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French Method of Preserving Sorrel

A method of preserving sorrel by boiling it in butter and sealing it in jars.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 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 ↓

French Method of Preserving Sorrel

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sorrel

  1. Wash the sorrel clean and let it drain.

  2. Melt the butter in an earthen pot.

  3. Add the sorrel to the melted butter and boil until done.

Jar and seal

  1. Pour the hot sorrel into stone or earthen jars that have been buttered on the sides.

  2. Let it stand until the next morning.

  3. Melt some mutton or beef fat and pour it over the sorrel to cover it about an inch thick.

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).

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

What each ingredient does

Sorrel
Provides the tart, leafy flavor that defines the dish.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and its melted layer helps the sorrel hold together.

The step that matters

Covering the sorrel with fat. The fat layer must fully cover the sorrel, about an inch thick, so no leaf is left touching air. Exposed surfaces are where spoilage starts, so a continuous, unbroken seal matters most here.

“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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