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Photo by Holly A. Heyser
One of the first things I did when I moved to California was plant sorrel in my backyard. It is my kind of veggie: Tart, tender, drought-resistant, indestructible. Ignore it and sorrel thrives. Stomp on it and it comes back stronger. And it’s green almost all year long. So why did it take me so long to make this soup?
Sorrel soup is a classic. It is a harbinger of spring all over Europe, and several versions of it exist from Scotland to France to Russia. Sorrel, like many early-spring greens, is a tonic after so many months of eating roots and preserved meats. It is very high in Vitamin C and reasonably high in iron. It’s tang — I call it “lemonade in a leaf” — comes from oxalic acid, the same thing that make its cousin rhubarb taste the way it does.
Everything about sorrel soup sounded wonderful, save one: For whatever reason, sorrel turns olive green almost the second it touches the heat. Sorrel looks like overcooked collard greens even before it’s fully wilted. And I have a thing about overcooked greens, although I am trying to get over it. I want my greens to shine like emeralds, not look like the side of an Army truck.
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
Last week I stood in my yard, staring at my gigantic sorrel patch. Will another year pass without me making sorrel soup? I got out my scissors. No, I’d suck it up and deal with the drab.
Now you don’t have to garden to enjoy sorrel. I grow the common garden sorrel that was developed in France centuries ago, but there are several wild sorrel species that live in North America.
Most common are the oxalis family, of which there are scores. Chief among this clan is creeping wood sorrel, Oxalis corniculata, which looks like shamrocks with little yellow flowers. It turns bronze in cold weather and often infiltrates your lawn. There is another sorrel that lives in the West Coast, Oxalis albicans. It too has shamrocks, only they’re larger and the yellow flowers are the color of saffron-and-cream. You see this sorrel a lot in the Bay Area.
In the woods you will find sheep sorrel, Rumex acetosella. It has tiny, arrow-shaped leaves and grows in a little rosette. Sheep sorrel can carpet the forest floor. My garden sorrel is a relative of this one.
Since the French really pioneered the cultivation of sorrel, I decided to make my sorrel soup a French one. There are scores of recipes for this soup, but if you want to make a classic French dish you go to the classic French cookbook: Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. My version of this recipe differs from Julia’s only in that I used wild onions instead of regular onions, and I used more sorrel. Other than that, it is an homage to a master.
As you might expect from a vegetable whose chief attribute is tartness, this soup would be inedible without the cream and eggs to temper it. With them, however, it becomes a bright, smooth wake-up call from a long winter. All it needed for total balance was a good loaf of bread and a crisp white wine. Enjoy!
Photo by Holly A. Heyser
Sorrel Soup, French Style
You will need a fair bit of sorrel to make this recipe, as it cooks down into a puree alarmingly fast. You can buy sorrel at some fancy supermarkets, a lot of farmer’s markets in the spring — or you can garden your own or forage for it. (If you want to plant it in your garden, you can buy sorrel seed online.) If you can’t find it, substitute watercress and use sour cream instead of regular cream.
Serve this with bread and a nice white wine, or a floral beer like a Belgian.
Serves 4-6.
Prep Time: 5 minutes
Cook Time: 25 minutes
- 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, divided
- 1/2 cup chopped green onions, ramps or other wild onion
- 4-6 cups (packed) of chopped sorrel
- Salt
- 3 tablespoons flour
- 1 quart chicken stock or vegetable stock
- 2 egg yolks
- 1/2 cup cream
__________
- Melt 3 tablespoons butter in a soup pot over medium heat. Add the green onions or ramps and turn the heat to medium-low. Cover the pot and cook gently for 10 minutes.
- While the onions are cooking, pour the stock into another pot and bring to a simmer.
- Turn the heat up, add the sorrel leaves and a healthy pinch of salt and stir well. When the sorrel is mostly wilted, turn the heat back to medium-low, cover and cook 10 minutes. Stir occasionally. Mix in the flour and cook over medium heat for 3 minutes.
- Whisk in the hot stock, stirring constantly. Bring this to a simmer.
- To finish the soup, whisk together the egg yolks and cream. Temper the mixture by ladling a little soup into it with one hand, while you whisk the egg-cream mix with the other. Repeat this three times. (You are doing this to prevent the eggs from scrambling) Now start whisking the soup. Pour the hot egg-cream-soup mixture into the pot with the soup, whisking all the way. Let this cook — below a simmer — for 5 minutes. Do not let it boil or the soup will break. Serve at once.
So glad I found you on Twitter! I love using healthy food I can grow myself and sorrel sounds like the perfect veggie to add to my garden. I’m looking forward to trying this recipe and will start looking to see if I can find some locally. Great post, thanks so much for sharing. Have just added you to a must read on my blog list ;-D
I’ve got some of red-veined sorrel growing in my garden. http://www.johnnyseeds.com/p-7309-red-veined-sorrel.aspx Put it in a pot though to keep it under control. Unstoppable growing machine; some random critter came by and gave it a buzzcut, down to the ground, and in a month or two it was back up like nothing had happened.
I will definitely be making this with our resident oxalis. I still don’t understand why a person with perfectly good free food would want to go out and buy a plant that does the same thing.
: )
Hmm i wonder if that’ll grow well in Seattle. Looks mighty good. Serve it with a warm crusty baguette!
I do a lighter version of this soup: instead of the flour roux, egg, and cream I use potato to thicken the soup (simply cook chunks of peeled potato in with the other ingredients until tender and then puree the soup with an immersion blender).
I preserve sorrel (usually one of the wild ones) by wilting it in butter. Then I freeze enough of the sorrel butter for one batch of soup or sauce in a ramekin. Once frozen, I pop out the disk of sorrel butter and stash it with the others I’ve accumulated during the growing season. In winter when I’m ready to make sorrel soup or sauce (great on seafood), I just take one of the sorrel butter disks out of the freezer.
Mmm..reminds me of when I was a kid and my Granpa showed me two different types of wood sorrel in the yard, one with like purplish white flowers and one with yellow flowers. I used to love eating them as snacks while I was outside playing. I really got a kick out of the sour flavor. I often skipped about eating sorrel and sucking on honeysuckle blossoms. I’ll have to keep an eye out for either a plant here in germany or maybe at one of the specialty shops or if I’m lucky in the small farmers market. Thanks for the reminder.
I’ve got sorrel growing and was just thinking about what to do with it. Your note that it will survive being stomped on gives me hope that my division of the plant will survive as well! (I wanted to move it.)
This looks delicious. I have planted sorrel and will be trying this soup. Looks amazing. Thank you.
Have spent the past 6 years trying to eradicate this plant from our garden only to find out that it is not only edible, but delicious too. Fortunately my efforts were unsuccessful and some survived. My son and I dined on it this evening, it got a 10 out of 10. We will be taking better care of it from now on!
Love sorrel wild and cultivated though they are so different! I often nibble on wood sorrel raw in the woods here in ME while hunting, it’s got that nice lemon tang and I like to pretend it take the human sent off my breath;) Do you use the veg stock just for the veg heads or do you think chicken stock is too strong? I would be inclined to use a clear chicken stock.
Michael Q: I used pheasant stock, actually. And yeah, I put the veggie stock in there so this could be vegetarian. It’d be fine with either.
Great recipe. We wondered what to do with the sorrel- so we will try this. I would like to try pheasant stock, any thoughts on the flavor vs. chicken stock? Just curious…
Yeah, this post made my mouth water 2x now
@ Kyle,
Grows like a weed in Seattle. I have French Sorrel in my herb and salad garden (full sun), and oxialis all over my shady side yard.
I’m gonna try this tonight for dinner. Thanks!
Yup….looks amazing. Must grow some more sorrel this year and try this
Just made this last night. We don’t grow sorrel, but I’ve been getting it every week in my UCD student farm veggie basket. It was wonderful. And not as drab as I expected.
Thank you so much for this article and recipe! I also have had a big, beautiful sorrel patch… unused for years until yesterday I decided to find a recipe and finally make the soup. I only had a vague idea what to expect. Your recipe was delicious, and this soup is wonderful! Now I know I’m going to make much better use of my sorrel growing right outside! And thanks also for the info on Oxalis… which I’ve been allowing to grow wild where ever it comes up.
I’m on a soup kick and have had sorrel growing in my garden for three or four years. I usually add quite a bit of it to Caesar salads .. but wanted to try the classic sorrel soup .. will give yours a try. I’m going to add a potato and a little less flour.
Thanks ..
Hi,
I have sorrel growing in my garden in Brisbane, Australia, and really wanted to use it effectively. I followed your recipe to the letter, and what a beautiful meal I cooked. So satisfying, and full of flavour. I think I understand how the French achieve such satisfaction with their meals.
regards
Kimball
By the way, in addition to my previous post – there are only 2 of us, so I put the remainder in the freezer. I am hoping it will be OK. Also, the recipe lists 4 tablespoons of butter, with instructions for only three of them. So I left one out. I guess it didn’t make any difference.
regards
Kimball
We visited our local garden market in Kielce (Poland) yesterday (September 27th) and I bought a big bunch of sorrel. We have it growing wild in our meadow but usually the leaves are much smaller and only pickable in early Spring.
This looks like a good recipe so will be having this soup for my lunch today!
I make a Polish sorrel, szcaw in Polish, soup all year-round. Sorrell freezes beautifully. My daughter grew up on it and still looks forward my cooking it for her at age 30? It’s delicious.
[...] Both types are equally as charming. Pick leaves young for salads, but be sure to try your hand at sorrel soup, it is a treat. (It’ll be a lovely pink color if you make it with the red-viened [...]
As a kid I knew that the “sourgrass” with which I grew up in Southern California – it was everywhere in the orange groves in spring – was an oxalis. Now I’ve learned that it’s Oxalis pes-caprae, an invasive yellow-flowered import from South Africa that goes under the name of Bermuda buttercup. It occurred to me tonight to try making soup of it, and it too works. I was making an experimental batch: about a cup of chopped oxalis stirred into a combination of chicken stock and white wine, simmered, blended, and returned to the pot for the addition of a couple tablespoons of frozen duxelles (shallots, parsley, and mushrooms cooked to sludge in butter), then finished with a dollop of cream.