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Sorrel

A preserved sorrel dish cooked in butter and covered with fat to keep it fresh.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and sorrel work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 652 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Sorrel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sorrel

  1. Wash the sorrel clean and let it drain.

Cook and jar

  1. Melt the butter in an earthen pot and add the sorrel to boil.

  2. Once cooked, transfer the sorrel to stone or earthen jars greased with butter.

  3. Let it sit overnight.

Seal

  1. Melt the mutton or beef fat and cover the sorrel with an inch thick layer to prevent air exposure.

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. Butter + sorreltop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together652 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + muttontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,781 recipes

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

  3. Sorrel + muttontop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together48 recipes

    Shared aroma: octanal (fat, soap).

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

What each ingredient does

Sorrel
Is the main vegetable being cooked and preserved, giving the dish its tart, lemony flavour.
Butter
Cooks the sorrel in fat and coats the jars, adding richness and helping preserve the greens.
Mutton or beef fat
Forms a solid layer over the sorrel that blocks air, slowing spoilage.

The step that matters

Covering the sorrel with melted fat. Fat must fully cover the sorrel in an unbroken layer. Any exposed surface meets air and can spoil, so the seal needs to be complete.

Swap the sorrel

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

  1. Pepperfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Capersfits about as well
  4. Sorrelthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, mutton. 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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