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Soup

Cream of Sorrel

A soup made from sorrel, spinach, lettuce, butter, water, eggs, cream, and served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sorrel and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 317 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cream of Sorrel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the greens

  1. Wash the sorrel, spinach, and lettuce thoroughly.

Make the soup

  1. In a frying pan, melt the butter and cook the greens until tender.

  2. Transfer the cooked greens to a kettle with boiling water.

Finish and serve

  1. Just before serving, beat the eggs and mix in the cream.

  2. Serve the soup with squares of toasted bread in the tureen.

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 + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together317 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Sorrel + spinachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together204 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Spinach + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together427 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

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

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

  5. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sorrel
Provides the sharp, lemony acidity that defines the soup's flavour.
Butter
Adds fat and richness while softening the greens in the pan.
Eggs
Thicken the soup gently when beaten in and warmed, adding body and richness.
Cream
Adds fat and smoothness, mellowing the sharpness of the sorrel.

The step that matters

Mixing the eggs and cream into the soup. Eggs thicken when heated gently but curdle if the soup boils after they are added. Add them just before serving and keep the soup hot rather than boiling.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sorrel, spinach, butter, egg, cream, bread):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Chivefits about as well
  3. Shallotfits about as well
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sorrel, spinach, butter, egg, cream, 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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