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Sorrel Sauce

A sauce made from sorrel juice, butter, egg yolks, salt, pepper, and nutmeg, gently warmed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sorrel and nutmeg share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 89 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Sorrel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sorrel juice

  1. Pound sorrel leaves to extract 2 tablespoons of juice.

  2. Pass the juice through a sieve.

Make the sauce

  1. Combine the sorrel juice with melted butter and egg yolks.

  2. Add salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

  3. Warm the mixture gently without boiling.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sorrel + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together89 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Sorrel + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together419 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Butter + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together24,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Sorrel + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together652 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sorrel juice
Provides the tart, sharp flavour that defines the sauce.
Egg yolks
Emulsify with the butter and thicken the sauce as they warm.
Melted butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy texture.

The step that matters

Warm the mixture gently without boiling. Egg yolks thicken as they heat, but if they get too hot they scramble and the sauce curdles. Low, gentle heat keeps it smooth and creamy.

Swap the sorrel

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, egg, pepper, nutmeg):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Sorrelthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, egg, pepper, nutmeg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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