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Sorrel Soup
Remove the stalks from a pint of very fresh sorrel. Wash well in running cold water, take up with the hands and carefully press out all water. Then cut it into julienne strips. Heat a tablespoon butter in a saucepan, add the sorrel, cover the pan and steam on a slow range for ten minutes, occasionally mixing meanwhile; then mix in two tablespoons flour, moisten with two quarts white broth or water and one pint milk. Season with two teaspoons salt, half teaspoon white pepper and one teaspoon of sugar; mix a little, then let slowly boil for twenty minutes. Add the white of one egg and a half gill of cream; boil for one minute. Dilute the egg yolk with two tablespoons milk and add to the soup. Continually mix while cooking for five minutes more. Pour into a soup tureen and serve.
A French-style cream of sorrel, thickened first with a roux and finished with an egg liaison. The finish is where it can go wrong.
- The hinge: the yolk must not boilOnce the diluted yolk goes in, keep the soup below a simmer for the final five minutes of stirring, around 180F. The instruction to keep it moving is not decorative; brought back to a boil the yolk scrambles into threads and the soup turns grainy.
- A pint of sorrelA volume measure of the picked leaves; the recipe does not say how tightly packed, but reckon on roughly 3 to 4 oz after the stalks are stripped. Sorrel wilts to almost nothing, so err toward more rather than less.
- Non-reactive panSorrel is high in oxalic acid and can react with bare aluminium or unseasoned cast iron, discolouring the soup and giving it a metallic taste. Stainless or enamelled cast iron avoids the problem.
- White brothA light unbrowned stock, veal or chicken, unsalted or barely salted. Two teaspoons salt is calibrated to an unseasoned broth; taste before adding it all if using commercial stock.
- A half gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so a half gill is 1/4 cup, or 4 tablespoons.
- "Slow range" and the ten-minute steamLow heat, lid on. The sorrel collapses within two or three minutes and goes from bright green to olive drab; that colour change is normal and unavoidable, and no amount of blanching prevents it.
- The egg whiteThe recipe adds the white a minute ahead of the yolk and boils it briefly; boiled it will set in fine shreds unless whisked in off the boil and stirred hard.
- YieldTwo quarts of broth plus a pint of milk is ten cups going in, somewhat less after the twenty-minute boil; enough for eight to ten as a first course.
- OxalatesSorrel's sharpness is oxalic acid. A normal portion is harmless, but anyone advised to limit oxalate for kidney stones should treat this soup the way they treat spinach and rhubarb.
Sorrel soup belongs to two traditions at once, which is why it turns up in an international collection. In French cookery soupe à l'oseille is a bourgeois standard, usually enriched with a yolk-and-cream liaison exactly as here; in Poland, Ukraine and the Ashkenazi kitchen the same leaf goes into sorrel soups of their own — Polish zupa szczawiowa, Ukrainian green borscht, Jewish schav — with no roux at all, some served hot and some cold. The version printed here is unmistakably the French one, built on a white broth and a light roux and finished at the last moment with egg. Sorrel itself was a common kitchen-garden herb through the nineteenth century, valued for arriving early in spring and for the sourness it supplied before lemons were cheap; it fell out of general use in English-speaking countries, and it is now mostly a farmers' market plant again.