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Cream of Sorrel
Discard all stale leaves from three pints of fresh sorrel, thoroughly wash in cold water and drain on a cloth. Heat one and a half ounces melted butter in a saucepan, add the sorrel, cover the pan and cook for fifteen minutes, stirring with a wooden spoon quite frequently meanwhile. Add two and a half ounces of flour and stir well while heating for two minutes. Moisten with two quarts of white broth and one pint of milk, adding two branches parsley, one branch chervil, a good teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper, one teaspoon sugar and a saltspoon grated nutmeg; lightly mix, and let slowly boil for thirty minutes. Dilute two egg yolks with half a gill of cream and add to the soup, lightly mix while heating without boiling for five minutes, press it through a sieve into a vessel, then through a cheesecloth into a soup tureen and serve.
A classic French sorrel velouté, built as a roux soup and finished with an egg-and-cream liaison. The measurements are professional-kitchen scale, and the quantity produced is larger than most home cooks expect.
- The hinge: do not boil after the yolks go inOnce the diluted yolks are stirred in, the soup must stay below a simmer — roughly 175-180F — or the eggs will curdle and no amount of sieving will fully hide it. Five minutes over low heat, stirring, is all it needs.
- Use a nonreactive panSorrel is high in oxalic acid and will turn grey and metallic-tasting in bare cast iron or unlined aluminium. Stainless or enamelled steel keeps the flavour clean, though the leaves will still lose their green and go olive-drab; that is normal.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of cream is 4 tablespoons. A saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon — two saltspoons of cayenne is about 1/2 teaspoon, which is assertive but not extreme spread across two and a half quarts.
- Three pints of sorrelThis is a loose volume measure of leaves, not a weight; reckon on 6 to 8 ounces of trimmed sorrel, which is two or three generous supermarket bunches. Strip the coarse stems along with the stale leaves.
- White brothA light unbrowned veal or chicken stock, unseasoned and unreduced. Any good chicken stock stands in; if it is a salted commercial stock, taste before adding the full teaspoon of salt.
- Shorten the sorrel cookingSorrel collapses to a purée in four or five minutes over moderate heat; the full fifteen minutes covered only deepens the drab colour.
- ChervilRarely sold fresh outside farmers' markets and useless dried. A branch of tarragon plus a little flat parsley gives the nearest anise-edged note; add it in the last ten minutes rather than at the start.
- The double strainingThe sieve breaks down the leaf; the cheesecloth catches the herb stems and any set egg. Press hard with a ladle rather than letting it drip, or much of the purée stays behind.
- YieldAbout two and a half quarts, or ten first-course servings. Halving the recipe works without adjustment.
Sorrel soup is one of the oldest uses of the plant in European cooking, valued less as a vegetable than as a souring agent in kitchens that had no lemons to spare — the leaf's sharpness comes from oxalic acid, and the French name oseille and the English "sorrel" both trace back to words meaning sour. This particular treatment, sorrel sweated in butter, bound with roux and finished with yolks and cream, is the standard French restaurant version, closely related to potage Germiny, generally said to be named for a nineteenth-century Comte de Germiny and long a fixture of Paris club and hotel menus. Its presence in an American cookbook of the period reflects how thoroughly the American fine-dining room of the early 1900s was French in vocabulary and technique; the same period saw sorrel soup arrive by an entirely separate route as schav, the cold Jewish soup of Eastern European immigrants, made without butter and dressed instead in its own way, often with sour cream or chopped egg.