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Sorrel Puree

A soup made from sorrel, onion, garlic, and butter, served with fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Sorrel Puree

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean, pick, and wash the sorrel.

  2. Cut the onion into rings and chop the garlic.

Make the soup

  1. Fry the onion and garlic in butter until golden.

  2. Add the sorrel and cook until soft.

  3. Pass the mixture through a wire sieve, including the liquid.

  4. Add hot water to achieve a nice soup consistency.

  5. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Serve

  1. Serve with fried bread cut into dice.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  4. Sorrel + clovetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together88 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Sorrel + garlictop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together97 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Sorrel
Provides the main leafy flavour and, once cooked and sieved, the body of the soup.
Butter
Carries the onion and garlic, adding richness and helping them turn golden through gentle frying.
Onion
Builds a sweet, savoury base as it softens and browns in the butter.
Garlic
Adds aroma that deepens as it fries briefly with the onion in butter.

The step that matters

Frying the onion and garlic until golden. Browning builds flavour through the Maillard reaction, but garlic burns quickly and turns bitter, so the heat should be moderate and the pan watched closely.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sorrel, onion, garlic, butter, pepper, bread):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sorrel, onion, garlic, butter, pepper, 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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