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Sorrel Soup
Take a quart of bouillon or of meat extract and water. Fry in butter a carrot, a turnip, an onion, a small cabbage, all washed and chopped, and add half a teaspoonful of castor sugar. Put your soup to it and set on the fire. Let it simmer for twenty minutes, add any seasoning you wish and a little more water, and let it simmer for another half hour. Then shred a bit of basil or marjoram with a handful of well washed sorrel, throw them in, cook for five minutes, skim it, pour it into a soup tureen, and serve.
A thin vegetable soup finished with sorrel, from the wartime collection of recipes given by Belgian refugees. The whole point is the last five minutes; everything before it is a mild vegetable broth.
- Sorrel goes in lastSorrel collapses to a khaki puree almost instantly and turns bitter and metallic if boiled hard. Five minutes at a bare simmer, as written, is the outer limit; two or three is better if the leaves are young.
- Avoid reactive pansSorrel is high in oxalic acid, which reacts with bare cast iron and unlined aluminium, dulling the colour and giving the soup a tinny taste. Use stainless steel or enamelled cast iron.
- Castor sugarSuperfine sugar. Half a teaspoon in a quart is a seasoning, not a sweetener — it takes the edge off the sorrel's acidity. Ordinary granulated sugar dissolves perfectly well here.
- Bouillon or meat extract"Meat extract" means Bovril, Liebig or a similar concentrate, standard pantry stock in 1915. A quart of any decent beef or chicken stock does the job; if using a concentrate or cube, hold back on salt until the end, since these are heavily salted.
- Quantities left open"A small cabbage" in a quart of broth is a lot by modern taste — a quarter of a small green cabbage, finely shredded, is closer to what the soup wants. One medium carrot, one small turnip and one onion, all diced small so they cook through in the given time.
- The frying stepSweat the vegetables in butter over moderate heat until soft and just beginning to colour, about eight to ten minutes. This is where the soup gets whatever body it has, so do not rush it.
- Total time and yieldAbout an hour of simmering all told, which reduces the quart noticeably — the instruction to add "a little more water" partway through is a top-up, not a dilution. Serves three to four as a first course.
- A handful of sorrelRoughly 2 ounces of leaves, stems stripped. If sorrel is unavailable, no herb substitutes for it; young spinach with a squeeze of lemon approximates the effect without the character.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in Britain in 1915 from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees displaced by the German invasion, and was published in aid of refugee relief — which suits the frugality of pages like this one, where a quart of broth and a few root vegetables are stretched into a course. Sorrel (zuring in Flemish, oseille in French) was a common kitchen-garden plant across the Low Countries and northern France, valued because it comes up early in spring and returns year after year with no attention; its sharpness could serve where lemon was not to hand. Belgian cooking uses it freely, most famously with eel in paling in 't groen, and a sorrel soup thickened with nothing but its own greens is a plain expression of the same habit. The fried vegetable base and the pinch of sugar are unremarkable for the period, the sugar there to balance an acid green rather than to sweeten.