Sauce to Salad

SORREL

SORREL was listed as an English herb in the thirteenth century but has been forgotten. It is a common plant which grows wild in most fields and has a leaf shaped like an arrow, is easy to grow in the garden and maybe cooked like spinach. The old Cornish name for the plant is Sour Sauce, and in the Duchy, they still make Sour Sauce Pasties. It is well known and liked in Hungary and Poland.

It is a delicious vegetable when cooked like spinach to serve with fish, the slightly astringent taste is as perfect with it as the more conventional slice of lemon. Spinach makes a passable substitute for sorrel if the juice of about half a lemon is added to it when cooked. Sorrel salad was once much favoured with lamb or veal cutlets, and the sorrel sauce was customarily served with a duckling, young geese and with lamb. (English Recipes: Eighteenth And Nineteenth Century Cookery Books)

SORREL SAUCE
with pink lady apples

I used pink lady apples instead of pippins.

SORREL SAUCE

‘TAKE A HANDFUL, or two of sorrel beat it in a mortar with two pippins (dessert apples) pared and quartered. Add to it a little vinegar and sugar. This is your green sauce to send in saucers’[From THE QUEEN’S ROYAL COOKERY BY T. HALL 1709]

Well done pan-fried salmon fillets
with mixed dried herbs served with Sorrel Sauce.

SORREL SALAD

'TAKE from the stems some very tender young sorrel and wash it delicately clean. Drain it well and shake it dry in a salad basket of in a soft cloth held by the four corners. Arrange it lightly in the bowl and, at the instant of serving, sauce it simply with a French dressing of oil and vinegar or with mayonnaise mixed with chilli vinegar instead of a milder vinegar. The sorrel may be divided with the fingers and mingled with equal portions of very tender lettuce and, when it is not objected to, mixed tarragon may be strewed thickly upon them.'

[ From MODERN COOKERY FOR PRIVATE FAMILIES

by Eliza Acton 1845]

I do like the sorrel salad recipe, I prepared it to serve with my ricotta zucchini loaf.