Skip to main content
Sauce

Green, or Sorrel Sauce

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

  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 powdered sugar.

  5. Heat the sauce and serve it over lamb, veal, or sweetbreads.

  6. 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 flavour that defines the sauce and breaks down into a smooth purée.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Powdered sugar
Softens the sharpness of the sorrel, balancing its acidity.

The step that matters

Pass the sorrel through a fine sieve. Sorrel cooks down to a fibrous mass, and only pressing it through a fine sieve removes the stringy bits and produces a smooth, glossy sauce. Skipping or rushing this step leaves the texture coarse.

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.

You might also like

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes