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Sorrel Sauce
Mix together one-half pint of green gooseberries well scalded, a little sugar, a glass of white wine, one-fourth of a pint of sorrel sauce, and one ounce of butter. Boil all together, and serve.
A short compound sauce that assumes you already have a sorrel purée on hand — read it as a finishing sauce for oily fish or goose rather than a sauce made from scratch.
- The circular ingredientThe "one-fourth of a pint of sorrel sauce" called for is a plain base the recipe assumes you have: sorrel leaves stripped of stems, wilted in butter until they collapse to a khaki purée, then sieved. Sorrel cooks down enormously, so something on the order of a pound of leaves will give the half cup wanted here.
- MeasuresHalf a pint of gooseberries is one cup; a quarter pint of sorrel purée is half a cup; one ounce of butter is two tablespoons. A "glass" of wine in this period is loose, but the usual cookery-book wineglass is about two fluid ounces.
- Green gooseberriesThese are unripe, hard and sharply acid — the point is tartness, not fruit sweetness. Ripe dessert gooseberries or the frozen ones sold now are sweeter and will need less sugar and a squeeze of lemon to compensate.
- "Well scalded"Pour boiling water over the berries or blanch them a minute so the skins soften; they should still hold shape going into the pan, and will burst as the sauce boils.
- Don't overboilSorrel loses its green almost immediately in heat and turns olive-brown, and prolonged boiling flattens its acidity. Bring the mixture to a boil, hold it a minute to marry, and take it off.
- Pan choiceSorrel is high in oxalic acid and, with wine and unripe fruit alongside it, will pick up metallic flavours from bare aluminium or cast iron. Use stainless or enamelled ware.
- Yield and servingAbout a cup and a half — enough for four to six portions. It is a sauce for mackerel, shad, salmon or roast goose, where the acid cuts the fat.
Sorrel and gooseberry both belong to the old European pantry of deliberate sourness, used before lemons were cheap and year-round. Green gooseberry sauce for mackerel is a long-standing English pairing — the French name for the fruit, groseille à maquereau, literally "mackerel currant," records the same habit — while sorrel sauce, oseille, is the classic French accompaniment to shad and to fatty poultry. Combining the two, as here, doubles down on acidity in a way that looks severe now but made sense on a menu heavy with rich fish and roast goose. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms and whose 1896 cook book this comes from, was compiling working restaurant practice rather than inventing dishes, and the entry's assumption that a plain sorrel purée is already standing in the kitchen is a hotel kitchen's assumption, not a household one.