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Sorrel and Potato Soup-Maigre

A soup of mashed potatoes and sorrel leaves cooked in butter and broth, served hot with toasted bread dice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and sorrel work together. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 72 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Sorrel and Potato Soup-Maigre

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Boil the potatoes until tender, then drain and mash them finely.

  2. Wash and chop the sorrel leaves, removing the midrib.

Make the soup

  1. In a stew pan, melt the butter and add the chopped sorrel, cooking until it becomes a pulp.

  2. Stir in a little vegetable broth, then mix in the mashed potatoes.

  3. Add more broth to reach the desired consistency, season with pepper and salt, and bring to a boil.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with toasted bread-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. Potato + sorreltop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together72 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

  3. Potato + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Sorrel + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together419 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Potato + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

What each ingredient does

Sorrel leaves
Cooks down to a pulp, giving the soup its tangy, bright flavour and green colour.
Potatoes
Mash into the broth to thicken the soup and give it a smooth, body-rich texture.
Butter
Melts with the sorrel to carry flavour and add richness to the soup.
Vegetable broth
Forms the liquid base, and its amount sets the final consistency of the soup.

The step that matters

Cooking the sorrel to a pulp. Sorrel becomes sour and can turn dull or dark if overcooked. Cooking it gently in butter until soft, then blending it with the potato, keeps the flavour fresh and the texture smooth.

Swap the sorrel

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Sorrelthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against potato, 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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