No. 262

Cream of Sorrel with Stuffed Eggs

Creme d'oseille aux Œufs Farcis

Pick the hard stalks from the sorrel, wash it in several waters to free it from all the adhering sand, then drain and press it. Weigh two pounds of this, and chop it up fine; put four ounces of butter into a saucepan, and when hot, add the chopped sorrel and fry it colorless; moisten with a quart and a half of white broth, and one quart of veloute (No. 415); season with salt, sugar, and nutmeg; then put it on the fire to boil slowly, removing the butter floating on the top. Strain it through a sieve or tammy, and put it back to come to a boiling point without letting it boil, and thicken with raw egg-yolks, cream and fine butter (No. 175), adding to it at the last moment some lettuce chopped up and cooked in consomme. Pour the soup into a tureen, and serve separately a garnishing of hard boiled, stuffed half eggs.

A Garnishing of Stuffed Half Eggs.—Cut lengthwise in two, some small hard boiled eggs; remove the yolks, and fill the whites with chicken forcemeat and cream, mixing in with it chopped mushrooms, hard boiled egg-yolks and fine herbs; let the stuffing be dome-shaped, then dust over with grated parmesan; lay these eggs on a dish, and brown them nicely in the oven. Place them in a vegetable dish, and pass it around the same time as the soup.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A classic French cream soup built on velouté and finished with an egg-yolk liaison, with a hot hors d'oeuvre of stuffed egg halves passed alongside. The soup is straightforward once the two supporting preparations are in hand.

The hinge: never let it boil after the liaisonOnce the yolks and cream go in, the soup must stay below a simmer or the yolks curdle and the texture is lost. Bring it just to the point of steaming, around 180F, and hold it there; Ranhofer says "to come to a boiling point without letting it boil" and means exactly that.
Velouté (No. 415) and white brothThe velouté is a light roux-thickened veal or chicken stock sauce, cooked and skimmed. A quart of a modern chicken velouté works; "white broth" is a pale, uncoloured stock from veal or poultry, not a browned brown stock.
Quantity of sorrelTwo pounds of picked, washed, pressed leaves is a great deal — appreciably more than that untrimmed at market, and a very large bowl before it wilts. Sorrel collapses to almost nothing in butter.
Use a nonreactive panSorrel is high in oxalic acid and can pick up a metallic taste and a grey cast from bare aluminium or cast iron. Stainless or enamelled steel keeps the flavour clean.
ColourSorrel turns olive-drab within seconds of hitting heat; "fry it colorless" means without browning the butter, not keeping it green. Do not extend cooking hoping the colour will improve.
TammyA tammy is a fine woollen or linen straining cloth through which the soup was forced with a wooden pestle. A fine chinois, or a blender followed by a fine sieve, does the same work.
The sugarSalt, sugar and nutmeg are all seasoning here, and the sugar is not optional garnish — a pinch or two offsets sorrel's sharp acidity. Add it early and taste again after the liaison.
The stuffed eggs need to cook throughThe filling is raw chicken forcemeat. Browning the parmesan tops under a hot grill will colour them long before the centre is safe, so bake them in a moderate oven, 350F, until the forcemeat reaches 165F, then colour the tops briefly at the end.
YieldA quart and a half of broth plus a quart of velouté, with the liaison, gives roughly ten to twelve soup-plate servings; allow one or two stuffed halves per person.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after some three decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and the book is essentially the working repertoire of a grand American restaurant run on French lines — hence the cross-references to numbered mother sauces and garnishes, which assume a brigade with velouté already made. Sorrel soup itself is far older and far humbler than this treatment: the plant was a standard European pot-herb long before it was a restaurant ingredient, valued for the sharp oxalic bite that gives it the French name oseille and the English one, sour dock. What Ranhofer does is take a peasant green, pass it through a tammy, enrich it with velouté and a yolk-and-cream liaison, and then hand the diner a separate hot garnish of stuffed eggs to eat alongside — the sort of two-dish soup service that marks the elaborate table of the 1880s and 1890s, and which largely vanished with the long multi-course dinner that supported it.