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Sorrel, French Receipt

A French sorrel soup made with stock, egg yolks, pepper, salt, and butter, served with poached or hard-boiled eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Sorrel, French Receipt

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. Add stock to a saucepan and let it stew gently for 30 minutes.

  2. In a basin, beat the yolks of the eggs.

  3. Remove the saucepan from the heat but keep it hot without boiling.

  4. Stir the beaten eggs into the stock.

Serve

  1. Before serving, place the sorrel on a dish and serve poached or hard-boiled eggs on top.

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. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 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

Stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the flavour of the soup.
Egg yolks
Thicken and enrich the soup as they gently set in the hot stock.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Stirring the beaten eggs into the stock. Egg yolk proteins set at moderate heat, so gentle warmth thickens the soup smoothly. If the stock boils, the yolks scramble and turn grainy, which is why the pan is taken off the heat first.

“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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