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Cream of Sorrel
Steam three or four handfuls of well-washed sorrel with one ounce of butter. After cooking for ten minutes, rub through a sieve into a saucepan, add one pint of bechamel sauce, and one quart of white broth, season with one-half tablespoonful of salt, and one teaspoonful of pepper, and let it boil for fifteen minutes. Thicken the soup with one teacupful of cream and the yolks of two raw eggs well-beaten together and serve with slices of bread or toast.
A classic French potage in Oscar Tschirky's shorthand, written for cooks who already had béchamel and stock on the stove. Two details need attention: the sorrel's reaction with metal, and the egg-and-cream liaison at the end.
- Never boil after the liaisonOnce the cream and egg yolks go in, the soup must be held below a simmer — around 175°F — or the yolks curdle and the soup turns grainy. Temper the yolk mixture with a ladle of hot soup first, then stir it back off the heat.
- Use non-reactive pansSorrel is high in oxalic acid and can react with aluminium or bare cast iron, discolouring the purée and giving it a grey metallic taste. Stainless steel or enamelled cookware is the safer choice.
- Three or four handfulsA handful is not a fixed measure; reckon on a few ounces of loosely packed leaves, since sorrel collapses to almost nothing. It needs no water beyond what clings to the washed leaves; ten minutes with the butter is enough to reduce it to a purée, and a blender does the sieving faster.
- White brothA light unbrowned veal or chicken stock, unsalted or lightly salted. Because béchamel already carries flour, milk and butter, a boxed stock will read thin here; use something with body.
- Béchamel quantityOne pint of béchamel to one quart of broth gives a soup thick enough to coat a spoon. Make the béchamel on the loose side — about 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour to the pint of milk — or the finished soup will be closer to a sauce.
- Cut the pepperA full teaspoon of ground pepper in six cups of soup is aggressive by modern taste, and it will fight the sorrel's sharpness. Start with a quarter teaspoon of white pepper and adjust.
- A teacupfulTeacup measures in books of this period run smaller than a modern 8-oz cup, commonly reckoned at somewhere between four and six fluid ounces; the book itself does not define the term.
- YieldAbout seven cups finished, or six to eight first-course servings. Serve at once — sorrel purée dulls from bright green to olive within minutes of cooking, and reheating only worsens it.
Sorrel soup belongs to the older European kitchen garden rather than the market: the plant is a perennial dock, sharply acidic from oxalic acid, and it was grown for centuries in England, France and across Eastern Europe as a spring green with built-in sourness — oseille in French, schav in the Ashkenazi kitchen, zelyonye shchi or "green shchi" in Russian cooking and zupa szczawiowa in Polish. Its appearance in the Waldorf's repertoire is squarely in the French line, where potage germiny — sorrel with a rich liaison of cream and egg yolks — was a fixture of hotel menus around 1900, and it is generally traced to the Paris restaurant kitchens of the mid-nineteenth century. Oscar Tschirky's version reads like a kitchen note rather than a teaching recipe, which is what most of this 1896 book is: shorthand for a brigade that already knew how to hold a yolk-thickened soup off the boil. Sorrel largely dropped out of American cooking, the usual explanation being that the household garden gave way to the grocery, since the leaves wilt fast and travel badly; it has come back mainly through farmers' markets and restaurant growers.