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To Stew Sorrel for Fricandeau

A simple stew of sorrel cooked with butter and coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sorrel and butter 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 ↓

To Stew Sorrel for Fricandeau

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the sorrel.

  2. In a stewpan, melt a piece of butter and add the sorrel and a little coarse sea salt.

  3. Simmer gently until cooked.

Finish

  1. Pass the mixture through a coarse sieve.

  2. Return the strained sorrel to the stewpan and keep it hot until ready to serve.

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. Sorrel + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together652 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sorrel
Provides the main leafy body and the bright, sharp flavour of the dish.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and giving the stewed leaves a smooth mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until cooked. Sorrel is mostly water and collapses quickly. Gentle heat softens it evenly without scorching the butter or turning the leaves dark and bitter, and it keeps the colour bright.

“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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