Adding a Little Sour to the Salad

The congenial ingredient, sorrel

The crows gathered, chattering in the pine tops this morning as I knelt in the garden and set out a dozen red-veined sorrel plants. I wondered if the crows were plotting to have a taste of the lemony leaf after I left. Sorrel is a member of the buckwheat and rhubarb family, and it served as a flavorful and reliable source of nutrition for the indigenous peoples on this continent for thousands of years before European explorers arrived. The plant is kin to oxalis, the dainty wildflower also known as wood sorrel that blooms yellow, white, pink or red and has three heart shaped leaves joined at their points on the stem. Oxalis, though tiny and fragile, is also edible.

Sorrel comes up in early spring–even in poor soil–and will overwinter or reseed if you let it. With their sharp tang, sorrel leaves can be used to brighten up soups and sauces that are often created with the addition of heavy cream or an abundance of butter and shallots. It’s easy to find recipes on line these days that call for sorrel as a congenial ingredient in omelets and tarts, too.  

Red-veined sorrel ready for planting as an ornamental or to eat!

Sorrel is an acidic herb. It contains oxalic acid (as does spinach), which can be poisonous to humans if eaten in enormous quantity. You know that sense of something sticking to your teeth when you eat spinach? That fuzzy feeling comes from the oxalic acid in the spinach binding with calcium in your mouth.  Fortunately, in addition to vitamins A and C and potassium, sorrel also contains calcium, which actually serves as a foil for the oxalic acid, according to long- ago research on spinach conducted by the famous Duke University biologist Knut Schmidt-Nielsen at the start of his wide-ranging career.  

The presence of calcium in sorrel has also made the plant a beneficial ingredient in herbal creams designed to keep wrinkles away and facial skin firm, according to the Australian herb experts John and Rosemary Hemphill, who suggest that sorrel can be used to good effect in a facial steam and “can also be taken as a tea to help clear the skin." 

"Sorrel seeds should be sown in March,” pronounced Ms. Eleanour Sinclair Rohde in her charming little book, A Garden of Herbs, published in London in 1920 and now available free as an E-book on Google. The ever frugal Ms. Rohde argues that sorrel soup can be made with milk “but is better and cheaper with potatoes.” She also mentions–in the archaic spelling of her time–that sorrel can be used “to take Staines out of ones Hands Presently. You may do this with the iuyce [juice] of Sorrell, washing the stained parts therein.”

Though March is now past, it is still a fine time to plant sorrel seeds or find plants already started, as I did a few days ago at Big Bloomers Flower Farm in Sanford, North Carolina. Their greenhouses did not yet have the French sorrel (Rumex scutatus) or the common sorrel (Rumex acetosa) potted and ready for sale. And as I have learned in reading, many chefs prefer the French over the common sorrel, since the latter has broad leaves that can get quite large and bitter enough to require blanching before eating. 

Oxalis growing wild between the stepping stones in my garden.

The red-veined Rumex sanguineus that I was able to buy(in four packs for $2.95) will make a colorful addition to lettuce salads well into fall if we don’t have a major drought. The leaves, best picked small, are tender, lemony, and not too sour. (Sorrel means sour in French.)

I don’t remember eating sorrel until the ace cook Jim Harb served it to me in a salad and then shared some seeds. Jim says he routinely combines sorrel from his garden with arugula and mint to make a refreshing first course. “It’s just so bright and lemony tart that it picks up any salad,” he says.   

And here’s an expert tip Jim sent along that is also worth considering, regardless of whatever greens you may have on hand: “A secret to luscious salad,” he wrote, “is to wet the greens lightly with water. Many people take lettuce straight out of the fridge and dress it. WRONG! The greens need to be wet slightly so that the water can dissolve the salt (which should go on first).  Then, comes the acidity [meaning vinegar or citrus juice or both]. If the oil goes on before, the acid can’t hit the greens, so only the oil/fat covers the greens.  So, water, salt, acid, and then finally oil, in that order.”

Thanks, Jim. One more timely fact about sorrel caught my attention. The herb is often served as an accompaniment to fish. Shad–featured in the March chapter of my upcoming book on N.C. heritage foods through the year–are actually swimming upstream right now to spawn in North Carolina rivers.  These slab-sided, silvery fish, which are larger than their near-relative the herring, have been much prized by Tar Heels in the past, but they are also known for their prodigious bones. 

According to The Oxford Companion to Food, sorrel was often applied as a stuffing for shad, the belief being that the oxalic acid would dissolve the smallest, worrisome bones in the fish as it cooked, not to mention that sorrel’s sharp flavor was delicious with this oily fish.             

The British food writer and restaurateur Tom Jaine experimented with this theory and found it improbable. Shad bones are better dissolved by prolonged cooking, he discovered. 

One last idea: pounding sorrel leaves into a paste with vinegar or lemon juice and a touch of sugar creates what the English back in Ms. Rohde’s day rather unromantically called greensauce. 

I shall make some greensauce this spring, and I’ll let you know how it goes on, say, trout when the time comes.