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Cream of Sorrel
This is an excellent spring soup. One quart of sorrel; three tablespoons of butter; two tablespoons of flour; one and one-half teaspoons of salt; one-fourth teaspoon of pepper; one teaspoon of sugar; one-half onion; onehalf cup of water; one pint of milk; one pint of cream. Wash the sorrel, put in the cold water and stew ten minutes. Drain the sorrel and chop very fine. Cut the onion into very small pieces and fry in the butter, slowly, five minutes; then add the flour and stir till frothy and smooth. Now add the sorrel, sugar, salt and pepper, stir for three minutes and then gradually pour in the cold milk. Simmer five minutes, meanwhile heating the cream boiling hot. Strain the soup, pour in the cream, and serve at once.
A short, straightforward velouté-style soup that hinges on one thing: sorrel is acidic enough to curdle dairy if the heat gets away from you.
- Keep the heat gentle once dairy is inSorrel's oxalic and malic acids will break milk and cream at a hard boil. Hold the milk stage at a bare simmer, and add the hot cream off the heat just before serving rather than cooking it in.
- A quart of sorrelThis is a volume measure of loose raw leaves, not a weight: depending on how tightly they are packed, roughly 2 to 4 ounces, or a couple of bunches. It collapses to almost nothing, which is why the yield leans on the milk and cream.
- Use a non-reactive panBare cast iron, aluminium and unlined copper all take on a metallic taste and grey colour from sorrel. Stainless or enamelled cast iron only.
- The sugar is not for sweetnessOne teaspoon in two pints of dairy is there to round off the sourness. Taste at the end; a very acidic batch of sorrel may want slightly more.
- Stewing and choppingTen minutes in half a cup of water is long by modern standards for a tender leaf — the sorrel will be fully broken down and khaki-coloured. Two to three minutes gives a fresher flavour, and a blender does the "chop very fine" step better than a knife.
- StrainingThe instruction to strain removes the onion and leaf fibre, giving a smooth cream soup. If you prefer texture, skip it, but then chop the onion finely enough that it disappears.
- YieldAbout a quart of finished soup, or six small first-course servings. It does not reheat well once the cream is in.
Sorrel (Rumex acetosa) was a standard kitchen-garden green in Europe and in American gardens well into the nineteenth century, valued precisely because it came up early and tasted sharp after a winter of stored roots and salt meat — hence "an excellent spring soup." The French tradition of soupe à l'oseille and sorrel purée with fish or eggs stands behind a dish of this kind, and the method here is a plain French one: an onion-and-butter roux, the acid green folded in, then milk and cream. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, issued cookery titles alongside its patterns, and the inclusion of sorrel is a small marker of how much more common home-grown greens were on the table than they are now; sorrel has largely retreated to farmers' markets and gardens because it wilts fast and does not ship.