Using Common Garden Sorrel
Common or garden sorrel has a tart, lemon flavor and was popular in the 1800s. The larger leaves were used for soups and sauces and the young leaves for salads. I haven’t been able to find out why people quit using it, but it now seems to be making a comeback.
You probably won’t find sorrel in a grocery store because it doesn’t ship or store well, even when refrigerated. It doesn’t tolerate heat well, so try growing it as a spring plant.
INFORMATION BELOW FROM 1800s COOKBOOKS
Sorrel is more used as a sauce for entrées or in soups. The spring of the year is the only time it can be used for a second course. Sorrel and Swiss chard are often used together as the chard modifies the acidity of the sorrel.
SORREL SAUCE
Put about a quart of fresh, green, and thoroughly washed sorrel leaves into an enameled saucepan with a little fresh butter. Let the sorrel stew till it is tender. Rub this through a wire sieve, then add a little powdered sugar and a little lemon juice. A little cream may be added, but is not absolutely essential.
SPRING SALADS
1. Take spinach, parsley, sorrel, lettuce, and a few onions. Then add oil, vinegar, and salt to give it a high taste and relish, but let the salt rather predominate above the other ingredients.
2. Prepare some lettuce, spinach tops, pennyroyal, sorrel, a few onions, and some parsley. Then season them with oil, vinegar, and salt.
3. Another salad may be made of lettuce, sorrel, spinach, tops of mint, and onions, seasoned as before.
SORREL WITH POACHED EGGS
Pick and well wash a sufficient quantity of sorrel. Drain, and put it into a stew-pan without any water. Stir over the fire till it is melted, then lay it upon the back of a hair sieve.* With a wooden spoon, rub it through into a dish. Then put it into a stew-pan with one-fourth pound butter and one spoon of flour. Mix well, season with a little pepper and salt, and add half a pint of good stock.
Let it boil, then take it from the fire and stir in four new-laid eggs separately, stirring a minute over the fire after each. Then add three pats of butter, and serve in a deep dish with eight poached eggs upon the top.
*hair sieve – a strainer with a wiry fabric bottom usually woven from horsehair.
STEWED SPINACH WITH SORREL
Take spinach and sorrel, in the proportion of three fourths of spinach to one of sorrel. Pick and wash these very nicely; cut them a little, and put them into a stew-pan with two or three spoons of water. Keep them stirring over the fire till they begin to soften and to liquify. Then leave it to stew at a distance over the fire for an hour or more, stirring it every now and then.
Thicken it with a little flour, and when quite done, add some pepper and salt, and serve it up. This will form an excellent sauce to all kinds of meat or to eat with potatoes. Almost any kind of cold, cooked vegetables may be added. They should be put in just long enough to heat, and mixed in properly with the spinach before it is served up.
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SORREL SOUPS
SORREL SOUP No. 1 — Pick off the stems and wash the leaves of a quart of sorrel. Boil in salted water, drain, and chop fine. Mix a small amount of butter and flour in a saucepan and when the butter is melted, turn in the sorrel and let it cook for a couple of minutes. Add three pints of well- seasoned beef or veal stock and stir until it boils. Or the stock may be half meat stock and half cream or milk.
Just before serving, beat up two eggs and turn over them the boiling soup, which will cook them sufficiently. A sliced onion, or a few blades of chives boiled with the sorrel is a welcome flavor occasionally.
SORREL SOUP No. 2 — Put one pint of sorrel into a sauce-pan with a dessertspoon* of salt and one gill* of cold water. Cover it and cook until it is tender enough to pierce with the fingernail. Then drain, wash it well with cold water, chop it, and pass it through the kitchen sieve with a wooden spoon.
Meantime, brown one-half ounce of chopped onion in a sauce-pan with one ounce of butter and one ounce of flour. Then add two quarts of hot water, or hot water and stock, and the sorrel. Season with one teaspoon salt, one-fourth saltspoon* pepper, and the same of nutmeg.
Mix the yolks of two eggs with two tablespoons of cold water. Add to them one-half pint of boiling soup, then gradually stir the mixture into the rest of the soup, boiling it a minute after it is thoroughly blended. Meantime, cut two slices of bread into half inch dice, fry them brown in smoking hot fat, and drain them free from grease on a napkin. Put them into a soup tureen, pour the soup on them, and serve at once.
*dessertspoon – two teaspoons.
*gill – a liquid measurement; four ounces in the U.S. and five ounces in the U.K.
*saltspoon – a miniature spoon used with an open salt cellar for individual use before table salt was free-flowing. One saltspoon equals one-fourth teaspoon.
SORREL SOUP No. 3 — Pick, wash, and chop fine one-half pound sorrel. Peel and cut up in slices one and one-half pounds potatoes, and set both over the fire. Add three pints water, one ounce of butter, and salt and pepper to taste. When the potatoes are quite tender, pass the soup through a sieve. Serve with sippets* of toast.
*sippets – bits of dry toast cut into a triangular form.
SORREL SOUP No. 4 — To one quart of sorrel, add a handful of spinach and a few lettuce leaves. Put them in a frying pan with a large piece of butter and cook until done. Add two quarts of boiling water, season with salt and pepper and just before serving, add two eggs well beaten into a gill of cream. This is an excellent soup for an invalid.
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Backyard Foraging
65 Familiar Plants You Didn’t Know You Could Eat
There’s food growing everywhere! You’ll be amazed by how many of the plants you see each day are actually nutritious edibles. Ideal for first-time foragers, this book features 70 edible weeds, flowers, mushrooms, and ornamental plants typically found in urban and suburban neighborhoods. Full-color photographs make identification easy, while tips on common plant locations, pesticides, pollution, and dangerous flora make foraging as safe and simple as stepping into your own backyard.
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Have you Ever Eaten Garden Sorrel or Other Home-Grown Spring Greens? Please Leave a Comment Below.
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3 thoughts on “Using Common Garden Sorrel”
I didn’t know anything about sorrel and am inspired to see if any grows around here. Good day for soup here (May 10) in Colorado. We’ve gotten up to snow on the ground the last two mornings and a fire in the wood stove sure feels good.
When we were kids, there was a sort of weed in our lawn with small leaves that looked like clover and had little yellow flowers. We would pick it from the yard and eat a few pieces because it was sour. Our mother called it “sheep sorrel.”
But the sorrel I looked up for this post is larger and more like a garden plant, although it does grow wild. I’ve never had an opportunity to try that kind.
I’ve never seen this, unless it was wild and I didn’t recognize it. It looks a lot like a lettuce. You have reminded me that I need to make some soup.