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Sorrel Soup

A soup made from sorrel, onion, butter, flour, stock, eggs, and bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 14 ingredients
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Sorrel Soup

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 Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sorrel

  1. Combine sorrel, salt, and cold water in a saucepan. Cover and cook until tender.

  2. Drain and wash the sorrel with cold water, then chop and sieve it.

Make the soup

  1. Brown the onion in butter in another saucepan.

  2. Stir in flour and cook until brown.

  3. Add hot water or stock and the prepared sorrel. Season with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

  4. Mix egg yolks with cold water, then add boiling soup gradually, stirring well.

  5. Blend the mixture into the soup and boil for 1 minute.

Fry the bread

  1. Cut bread into half‑inch dice and fry until brown in hot fat. Drain on a napkin.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Sorrel + flourtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together231 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 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
Provides the soup's tart, acidic flavour and its green colour.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the onion brown for flavour.
Flour
Browned with the onion and liquid, it thickens the soup and gives body.
Eggs
Yolks mixed with cold water and blended in enrich and thicken the soup.

The step that matters

Adding the egg mixture to the soup. Egg yolks thicken by setting when heated. Add the boiling soup gradually while stirring so the yolks warm slowly and do not scramble into lumps before blending into the soup.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sorrel, butter, flour, pepper, nutmeg, egg, bread. 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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