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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.
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.
Sorrel is exceptional paired with seafood or chicken, and I often make a simple sorrel sauce whenever I have some trout or salmon or pheasant around.
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.
I stood in my yard, staring at my gigantic sorrel patch. Would another year pass without me making sorrel soup? I got out my scissors. No, I’d suck it up and deal with the drab.
You don’t have to garden to enjoy sorrel. I happen to 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!
Sorrel Soup, French Style
Ingredients
- 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, divided
- 1/2 cup chopped green onions, ramps or other wild onion
- 4-6 cups of chopped sorrel, packed
- Salt
- 3 tablespoons flour
- 1 quart chicken stock or vegetable stock
- 2 egg yolks
- 1/2 cup cream
Instructions
- 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 to the pot with the onions 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. Add the final tablespoon of butter. Let this cook -- below a simmer -- for 5 minutes. Do not let it boil or the soup will break. Serve at once.
Notes
Nutrition
Nutrition information is automatically calculated, so should only be used as an approximation.
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
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
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 ..
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.
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.
Yup….looks amazing. Must grow some more sorrel this year and try this
@ 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!
Yeah, this post made my mouth water 2x now 🙂
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…
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.
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.
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!
This looks delicious. I have planted sorrel and will be trying this soup. Looks amazing. Thank you.
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.)
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 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.
Hmm i wonder if that’ll grow well in Seattle. Looks mighty good. Serve it with a warm crusty baguette!
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.
: )
I’ve got some of red-veined sorrel growing in my garden. https://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.
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