Late spring is a sweet and gentle time of year, but two of the best things to eat now are anything but soft—they’re sour enough to make your hair stand on end. I speak, of course, of rhubarb (on which more soon) and of green, leafy, innocent-looking sorrel.
Sorrel looks like spinach and tastes like lemons, so sour and assertively citric that it’s tempting to believe some evil corporation has been shuffling genes among unrelated species. There are several sorrels, all members of genus Rumex, and all hardy, prolific, easy-to-grow perennials. The broad-leafed cultivated species (R. acetosa and R. scutatus) go to seed quickly in warm weather, so the season is short. Gather your sorrel leaves while ye may. (Try the farmers markets if you’re not growing your own.)
Sorrel can be used raw, though in that form it’s best in small doses, a few leaves shredded fine and tossed in a lettuce salad to wake everyone up. But apply just a suspicion of heat and sorrel melts into a mass that’s smooth in texture but sharp and lively on the tongue. It also turns from vivid green to an unfortunate olive drab, a drawback I’ve never overcome without adding more robust greens just for color.
The full-on sorrel experience is a soup made by sweating some member of the onion family in butter, adding stock and bringing everything to a boil, then pouring the hot stock right over shredded leaves of sorrel in the blender. A more restrained and wine-friendly version adds potatoes cooked in the broth (and uses a food mill to purée, since a blender will turn cooked potatoes into starchy goo). And the French make a velvety potage germiny by enriching the soup with egg yolks and/or cream (see the last paragraph on this page).
The French are no dummies, because sorrel marries beautifully with richness. Sorrel sauce is the simplest thing in the world—cook a diced shallot very gently in a fair amount of butter, add a huge mound of cleaned and shredded sorrel leaves to the pan, wait a minute or two until the leaves have softened and turned to almost nothing, and you’re done. In the past couple of weeks we’ve spooned it over poached eggs on toast and served it with a roast chicken, but the most spectacular combination was with fish. Inspired by the classic salmon à l’oseille, I fried up a few mackerel fillets and topped them with melted sorrel. Meaty, rich fish with bright, herby spring flavors: Meals don’t get better than that.
Speaking of seasonal, ephemeral and celestial: Tonight at 8:18 pm, the rays of the setting sun will shine straight down the cross-streets of Manhattan, an event Neil deGrasse Tyson of the Hayden Planetarium calls “Manhattanhenge.” Your next chance is 8:24 pm on July 11; after that you’ll have to wait for next year.
- Try some of Gourmet’s sorrel recipes:
- Sorrel Salad with Creamy Chive Dressing
- Sorrel-Wrapped Goat Cheese and Beet Stacks
- Salmon Wrapped Poached Eggs
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