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Sorrel Sauce

A sauce made from sorrel leaves, butter, lemon juice, sugar, pepper, salt, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Sorrel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick and wash the sorrel leaves clean.

  2. In a saucepan, melt the butter over low heat.

  3. Add the sorrel leaves, cover, and cook for 15 minutes.

  4. Rub the mixture through a coarse sieve.

Season and serve

  1. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, nutmeg, and sugar. Squeeze in the lemon juice and heat thoroughly.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Sorrel + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together89 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Sorrel + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together149 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sorrel leaves
Provide the main flavour and bulk, cooking down into a smooth green purée.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sharp, earthy flavour of the sorrel.

The step that matters

Cook the sorrel covered over low heat. Sorrel is delicate and turns dull or bitter if overcooked. Gentle, covered cooking softens the leaves in their own moisture, keeping the colour bright and the flavour fresh.

Swap the sorrel

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, nutmeg, sugar, lemon):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Sorrelthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, nutmeg, sugar, lemon. 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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