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Sorrel Soup
Wash well one-fourth pound of fresh sorrel and cut it into small pieces. Put two ounces of butter into a saucepan and make it hot; then put in the sorrel and toss it over the fire for a few minutes. Pour one pint of bechamel sauce over the sorrel, and stew it gently for fifteen or twenty minutes, seasoning to taste with salt and pepper and any kind of herbs desired. Cut some slices of bread, toast or fry them in butter till lightly browned, and cut them into small squares; then put them in a soup tureen, pour the soup over them and serve.
A short entry that assumes you already have a quart of the kitchen's standing béchamel to hand. Read it as a purée-thick soup for two rather than a large tureen.
- Béchamel firstThe recipe presupposes the house sauce: one pint of milk thickened with a roux of about 2 tbsp butter and 2 tbsp flour, simmered until it no longer tastes of raw flour. Make it before you touch the sorrel, since sorrel wants only minutes.
- ConsistencyOne pint of béchamel over a quarter pound of sorrel gives something closer to a thick purée than a soup. Thin it with light stock or milk until it coats a spoon and no more; the fifteen to twenty minutes of gentle stewing is there to marry the flavours, not to reduce.
- Sorrel behaviourSorrel collapses almost instantly in hot butter and turns from bright green to olive-khaki. This is unavoidable and not a fault. A quarter pound is a large supermarket bunch or a generous handful of loose leaves; strip out any thick stems.
- Pan choiceSorrel is acidic enough to pick up metallic flavours and grey tints from bare aluminium, cast iron or unlined copper. Use stainless steel or enamel.
- Oxalic acidSorrel's sharpness comes largely from oxalic acid, the compound usually blamed for the inedibility of rhubarb leaves. The quantity here is ordinary and safe for most people, though anyone advised to avoid oxalates for kidney stones should skip it.
- Seasoning"Any kind of herbs desired" would most plausibly point to chervil, parsley or chives, stirred in at the end. Avoid anything woody or resinous, which will bury the lemony note that is the whole point of the dish.
- The croutonsCut the bread into small dice before frying rather than after, or the toasted slices will shatter. Fry in clarified butter over medium heat so they brown without the milk solids burning, and add them to the tureen at the last moment.
- YieldA pint of finished soup serves two as a first course. Double everything for four.
Sorrel was a standard kitchen-garden green in Europe long before it was a restaurant ingredient, valued for a sourness that came from the leaf rather than from added vinegar or lemon — the French name oseille and the English word both trace to roots meaning simply "sour." French cookery treated it two ways: as a purée or chiffonade to serve under shad and other rich fish, and, as here, bound with a white sauce into a soup. Oscar Tschirky's book records the working repertoire of the Waldorf around the turn of the twentieth century, and its brevity on points like the béchamel suggests the sauce was a standing preparation a cook could simply be sent for, so that only its use needed spelling out. Sorrel largely fell out of American markets in the twentieth century, which is why a recipe that once assumed the leaf was ordinary now reads as an unusual one.