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Sorrel Sauce

A sauce made from simmered sorrel, butter, lemon juice, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Sorrel Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sorrel

  1. Pick and wash the sorrel clean.

Cook

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

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

Finish the sauce

  1. Pass the mixture through a coarse sieve.

  2. Season with pepper, salt, nutmeg, and sugar.

  3. Squeeze in the lemon juice and heat thoroughly.

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.
Butter
Adds richness and carries the flavour as the sorrel softens.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the butter.

The step that matters

Cook the sorrel covered over low heat. Gentle covered cooking softens the leaves in their own moisture and butter without scorching the butter. High heat can brown the butter and turn the sorrel dull or bitter.

Swap the sorrel

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, nutmeg, sugar, lemon):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Sorrelthe original

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