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Sauce

Green, or Sorrel Sauce

A sauce made from boiled sorrel, butter, pepper, salt, and sugar, served with lamb, veal, or sweetbreads.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Green, or Sorrel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Place the cleaned sorrel in a saucepan with the butter.

  2. Cover and cook over low heat for 15 minutes.

  3. Pass the sorrel through a fine sieve using the back of a wooden spoon.

  4. Season with pepper, salt, and sugar, then heat until warm.

Serve

  1. Serve under lamb, veal, or sweetbreads.

  2. Add cayenne, nutmeg, or lemon juice if desired.

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
Provides the sharp, lemony acidity that defines the sauce and breaks down into a smooth purée.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel, carrying flavour through the sauce.

The step that matters

Pass the sorrel through a fine sieve. Cooked sorrel holds a lot of fibre and liquid, so pressing it through a fine sieve is what turns it into a smooth sauce rather than a coarse, stringy mash.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sorrel, butter, pepper, sugar, lemon):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Tarragonfits better
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Nutmegthe original

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