🇵🇱 Poland and 🇱🇹 Lithuania · Eastern Europe (Poland, Lithuania and the Ashkenazi kitchen of the region)

Sorrel soup

A sour soup of fresh spring sorrel in broth or water, finished with sour cream and egg, eaten hot in Poland and often cold in Lithuanian and Ashkenazi Jewish kitchens.

Origin and history

A Polish article says sorrel soup was already known in the Middle Ages and later appeared in nearly every Polish cookbook, and that the early Slavs ate sorrel together with nettle, burdock and beet greens. It gives no date for the first soup. Polish cooks serve it hot, and a Polish food writer remembers it as a spring staple of childhood; the Ashkenazi schav is its cold relative, which The Nosher calls a favourite of the Jews of Eastern Europe.

Make it at home

Makes: 6 servings
Total time: 1 h 15 min
Hands-on: 30 min

Ingredients

Metric US

600 g1.3 lb pork ribs, in a few pieces; or 500 g bone-in chicken
2 l8 cups water, cold
2 carrots, peeled
1 parsnip or parsley root
1/4 small celery root, or 2 celery stalks
1 small onion, halved
2 bay leaves
4 allspice berries
400 g14 oz potatoes, peeled, diced; optional
500 g1.1 lb fresh sorrel leaves, stems trimmed, washed, finely chopped
2 tbsp butter
250 ml1 cup 18% sour cream, at room temperature
6 hard-boiled eggs, peeled, halved or diced
3 tbsp chopped fresh dill
salt and black pepper, to taste

Method

1. Put the ribs, carrots, parsnip, celery root, onion, bay leaves and allspice in a pot with the cold water.
2. Bring to a boil, skim off the foam and simmer gently for about 1 hour, until the meat is tender; salt lightly.
3. Remove the meat and vegetables. Shred the meat off the bones and dice the carrots; strain the broth back into the pot.
4. If using potatoes, simmer them in the broth for about 15 minutes, until soft.
5. Melt the butter in a pan and cook the sorrel for a few minutes until it turns olive-green and its liquid has evaporated.
6. Add the sorrel, shredded meat and diced carrot to the broth and simmer for 5 minutes.
7. Ladle a cup of hot soup into the sour cream, stir until smooth and pour it back into the pot off the heat; do not let it boil.
8. Season with salt and pepper, and serve with an egg and a sprinkling of dill in each bowl.

Notes

This page is the Polish hot form, zupa szczawiowa, spring soup of the household: pork ribs and root vegetables for the broth, sorrel, sour cream and a hard-boiled egg. The Polish sources give only a few amounts (250 ml of 18% sour cream; 500 g sorrel to 2 l of stock; 2 tbsp butter); the weight of ribs, the optional potatoes and the dill are our estimates, and Nasze Szlaki says to add as much sorrel as the soup needs to be pleasantly sour.
Polish Your Kitchen makes it on chicken stock, sautés the sorrel in butter and serves it with diced egg and garlic croutons; its author blends part of it, while a reader there notes that the traditional soup is not blended and carries pieces of vegetable, potato or rice.
The cold form is schav, the Eastern European Jewish soup: MyJewishLearning boils 1 lb (450 g) sorrel in 2 quarts (2 l) of water for 20 to 30 minutes, tempers 3 eggs plus a yolk with 4 cups of the hot soup, chills it, adds 1 tsp lemon juice just before serving and offers sour cream and hard-boiled egg. In Lithuania, LRT prints a cold soup of cooked sorrel, boiled water, sour cream, cucumber, green onion and dill, with an egg on the side, under the name of cold beet soup with sorrel.
If the soup is not sour enough, add a handful of raw chopped sorrel at the end. Spinach plus a little lemon juice approximates sorrel but changes the flavour.
Ukrainian green borscht is the neighbouring dish: a meat broth with potato, carrot and onion, with sorrel and herbs added at the end and sour cream at the table rather than stirred in. It also has a page of its own, as does the Russian botvinya. The meatless version of this soup uses vegetable stock.

Adapted from Nasze Szlaki: Zupa szczawiowa (recipe and history), Polish Your Kitchen: Polish Sorrel Soup (Zupa Szczawiowa), and MyJewishLearning, The Nosher: Schav.