Recipe no. 425 from Jean-Baptiste Reboul's La Cuisinière provençale (1909), page 199.
Ingredients
- sorrel
- water
- salt
- butter
- flour
- milk
- pepper
- nutmeg
- cream
- lemon
- eggs
Preparation
- Blanch the sorrelSort, wash the sorrel. Cook a quarter of an hour in salted water, drain on a sieve, strain.
- Sorrel sauceButter and flour roux, moisten with milk, add sorrel puree, season with salt, pepper, nutmeg. Cook an hour in the oven. Bind with beaten eggs, cream, butter.
- Poach the eggsSimmering water with lemon and salt. Break the eggs in, poach 4 minutes. Dress the sauce, eggs around.
Reboul's text
Sort and wash a basketful of sorrel, which you will put into a casserole with a few litres of water and a handful of salt. Let it cook a quarter of an hour, drain it then on a sieve, then strain it.
Put into a casserole a piece of butter the size of an egg with a good spoonful of flour, turn it a moment over the heat without letting it brown; moisten with a litre of milk, bring to a boil and add the sorrel puree: season with salt, pepper and nutmeg, cover the casserole and let it cook an hour in the oven. Take it out and add to it 2 eggs beaten with a little cream and a good piece of butter, stir it a few minutes over the heat to bind it and do not let it cook any longer.
Put into a casserole a litre of water, the juice of a lemon and a good pinch of salt, bring to a boil and break into it, one after the other, the number of eggs you want. Then move the casserole to the corner of the stove with a lid on top; 4 minutes are enough to poach them. Dress the sorrel on the platter and the eggs around it after draining them.
Small Provençal glossary for this recipe
Reboul writes in French: no Provençal word appears in this recipe, apart from the dish's name itself. The table below gives the Provençal equivalents of the words used, in mistralian spelling, translated by Lingua Nostra. Each form is attested in our Provençal-English dictionary; click to open the entry.
| Provençal | English |
|---|---|
| agradello | sorrel |
| casseirolo | casserole |
| agouta | to drain |
| sedas | sieve |
| passa | to strain |
| burre | butter |
| farino | flour |
| la | milk |
| muia | moisten |
| purèio | puree |
Source: Jean-Baptiste Reboul, La Cuisinière provençale, Marseille, 1909, recipe no. 425, page 199. Public domain. Transcription, formatting and Provençal glossary by Lingua Nostra.