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Chiffonnade Soup
Wash, drain, and chop very fine one quart of sorrel, with the green leaves of a lettuce-head. Brown in a saucepan, with two ounces of butter and a sliced onions seasoning with salt and pepper. Moisten with three pints of white broth, a handful of peas, string beans, and asparagus tops, and boil for three-quarters of an hour with one ounce of butter. Serve with slices of toasted bread.
A straightforward French vegetable soup built on sorrel, from the era when sorrel was a market green rather than a specialty item. A few of Oscar's terms need translating.
- ChiffonnadeHere it means the shredded greens themselves, not a garnish. Stack the sorrel and lettuce leaves, roll them tightly, and slice into thin ribbons rather than chopping at random.
- A quart of sorrelA volume measure, not a weight, and the recipe does not say whether it is taken before or after chopping. Expect only a few ounces of leaves if measured loose. Sorrel collapses to almost nothing, so the volume looks alarming before it hits the butter.
- White brothA light unbrowned stock, veal or chicken, made without roasting the bones. Three pints is six cups. An unsalted chicken stock is the closest supermarket equivalent.
- "Brown in a saucepan"Do not actually brown the greens. Sorrel turns khaki and bitter over high heat; sweat the onion in the butter first, then wilt the leaves gently until they slump.
- Cooking timeThree-quarters of an hour is long by current standards, and the peas, beans and asparagus tops will be grey and soft. Simmer the broth and greens for the long stretch if you like the flavour, but add the green vegetables in the last eight to ten minutes.
- The final butterThe recipe puts the extra ounce in with the broth and boils it for the full three-quarters of an hour. If you would rather treat it as a finishing enrichment in the later French manner, hold it back and stir it in off the heat so it emulsifies rather than splitting.
- Acidity and pansSorrel is high in oxalic acid, which reacts with bare aluminium and cast iron, dulling both the colour and the taste. Use stainless or enamelled cookware.
- YieldSix cups of broth gives four generous servings. The toasted bread is served alongside or floated in the bowl, not stirred in.
Sorrel soup in this shredded form belongs to a family of French potages that were standard on nineteenth-century hotel menus: potage santé, potage cultivateur, and the chiffonnade variants that took their name from the knife cut rather than any single ingredient. Sorrel's sharpness came from oxalic acid, and it was valued precisely because it gave a soup a lemony edge without lemon; it was grown widely in kitchen gardens on both sides of the Atlantic before falling out of the American vegetable trade in the twentieth century. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896, records the working repertoire of the Waldorf's kitchens, where a French brigade cooked French classics for New York diners, which is why a rustic garden soup appears here in the same section as far grander dishes. The instruction to serve it with toasted bread rather than croutons is a small mark of the older, plainer tradition the dish came out of.