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Potage Sorrel with Rice
Remove stalks of a quart of very fresh sorrel. Wash well in running cold water, drain, press out water with hands, then cut it into julienne strips. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a saucepan, add the sorrel, cover pan and let steam on a slow fire ten minutes. Add two tablespoons flour, mix well with spoon, moisten with two quarts white broth and one pint milk. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper and a teaspoon sugar, mix a little, add three ounces raw rice, then let slowly boil forty minutes; add the whites of two eggs, one gill cream, and boil one minute. Dilute the two egg yolks with a half gill milk, add to soup, continually mix while cooking for two minutes, remove, pour into a hot soup tureen and serve.
A classic French sorrel soup, thickened twice over — once with roux and rice, once with an egg-and-cream liaison. The liaison is the point of failure and deserves attention first.
- The liaison must not boilOnce the yolks and milk go in, keep the pot below a simmer — around 180F — and stir constantly for the two minutes given. A true boil curdles the yolks into grains that no amount of whisking will bring back. The instruction to "boil one minute" after the whites and cream is likewise best read as a bare simmer.
- Pan materialSorrel is sharply acidic (oxalic acid is what gives it the lemon edge). Use stainless steel or enamelled cast iron; bare cast iron, aluminium and unlined copper will give the soup a metallic taste and a grey cast.
- A gillHalf a cup, or 4 fluid ounces. The recipe uses a gill of cream and half a gill (¼ cup) of milk for the yolks.
- White brothAn unseasoned light stock — veal or chicken, simmered without browning. Use a low-sodium chicken stock and taste before adding the full teaspoon of salt, since commercial stock is already salted.
- A quart of sorrelLoosely packed leaves; the weight after stripping the stalks is only a few ounces, so treat any weight equivalent as approximate. Sorrel collapses to almost nothing in the pan and turns olive-drab within a minute of heating; the colour change is normal and cannot be prevented.
- Rice and cooking timeThree ounces is about a scant half cup of long-grain white rice. Forty minutes of boiling will break the grains down entirely, which is partly the intent here — the starch is doing thickening work. If you want the rice to hold its shape, 20 to 25 minutes is enough, and the soup will be thinner.
- The egg whitesWhites stirred into near-boiling soup set into fine threads rather than dissolving. Whisk them thoroughly with the cream before adding, and pour in a slow stream while stirring, or pass the finished soup through a fine sieve.
- YieldTwo quarts of broth plus a pint of milk makes a generous pot — eight to ten servings as a first course. It reheats badly once the liaison is in, so warm leftovers gently and never above a simmer.
Sorrel soup runs across northern and eastern Europe under many names — oseille in France, schav in Jewish and Polish kitchens, shchi in its Russian green form — and this version is squarely French in construction, with its roux, its white broth and its final liaison of yolks and cream. Sorrel was a common kitchen-garden herb long before it became a specialty item; its sharpness came from oxalic acid and served the same function lemon does now, cutting richness in an era when acidulants were seasonal. The rice is doing double duty as body and as starch, a thrifty way to give a soup weight without more cream.