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Sorrel with Poached Eggs

A dish of sautéed sorrel served with poached eggs, finished with butter, flour paste, brown sauce, and garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Sorrel and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 231 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sorrel with Poached Eggs

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sorrel

  1. Pick, wash, and drain the sorrel.

  2. Melt the butter in a stewpan over medium heat.

  3. Add the sorrel and stir for a few minutes until tender.

  4. Rub the cooked sorrel through a wire sieve back into the stewpan.

  5. Season with salt and pepper.

  6. Mix a little flour with butter to form a paste and add it to the sorrel.

  7. Moisten with brown sauce and let simmer for 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Dish the sorrel and top with trimmed poached eggs.

  2. Garnish with fleurons and drizzle with liquid glaze before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Sorrel
Provides the tart, bright flavour that defines the dish and forms the base of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the sorrel as it cooks, and its flour paste thickens the sauce.
Flour
Combined with butter into a paste that thickens the sorrel mixture as it simmers.
Brown sauce
Moistens the sorrel and adds savoury depth while it simmers.
Poached eggs
Provide a soft, runny yolk that enriches the sorrel base when cut into.

The step that matters

Rubbing the sorrel through a sieve. Cooked sorrel must be pushed through a fine sieve so the purée becomes smooth and even. Leftover fibres or lumps make the sauce grainy, and the sieve also removes excess liquid so the texture stays controlled.

Swap the sorrel

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

  1. Capersfits about as well
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Sorrelthe original
  4. Nutmegfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, flour, sauce, egg. 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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