Month: June 2018

This is one of my mum’s recipes which I ate regularly as a child, and recently felt I wanted the comforting taste of mum’s home cooking.   I was given a bunch of sorrel by a friend (along with some cuttings for the garden – another story) and immediately decided to try and recreate my mum’s soup with the sketchy instructions scribbled many years ago in an old exercise book.  Surprisingly (given my lack of real cooking skills), it worked quite well.  The taste was almost spot on.  But lesson learned – cut the stems off the sorrel and just use the leaves – the stems proved stringy and slightly woody, which makes for an annoying way to eat when you have to keep picking bits of tough grass out of your mouth.

I needed lamb bones for the base – the butcher tried to talk me out of lamb, saying it would be too fatty, but I insisted that my mum’s recipe said lamb (not beef) so he cut up some lamb neck, which turned out to be fine.  I shredded the meat back into the soup to make it more substantial, but that’s not what mum used to do – she’d give us the meat separately.  I substituted the potato for a mix of purple and white sweet potato, and left out the milk.  Don’t know why I’m bothering with the original recipe really, but it’s a starting point.

Mum’s quantities were always along the lines of ‘a handful’ or ‘to taste’ which is fine if you’re an experienced cook, but try the following suggestions and see how you go.

Sorrel Soup Recipe

• Lamb bones
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 1 carrot, finely chopped
• 4 cups water
• 2 large handfuls of sorrel leaves, roughly chopped
• 2 tablespoons chopped dill
• 2 potatoes, peeled, finely cubed
• 1 hard-boiled egg, finely chopped
• ½ cup warm milk (optional)
• Salt, to taste

Gently fry onion and carrot until soft.  Add lamb bones, water, and salt to taste.  Simmer for 30 minutes, then add sorrel, dill and potatoes.  Simmer for a further 30 minutes.  Turn off the heat, remove lamb and bones and stir in egg and milk.