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Sorrel sauce with pan-grilled salmon |
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6 x 140g/5oz salmon fillets
1-2 tablespoons olive oil
salt and freshly ground black pepper
115g/4oz sorrel, washed
30g/1oz butter
285ml/1/2 pint whipping cream
Cooking instructions
Preheat an oven-top grill pan over a medium heat. Rub the salmon with some olive oil and season to taste. Place flesh side down on the grill pan and cook for 4 minutes. Then lift gently and reposition - still flesh-side down - so that its flesh is seared with golden diamond crisscross grill lines. After 4 minutes, turn skin-side down and cook for 4 minutes until just rosy inside.
Meanwhile, fold together the two edges of each sorrel leaf and rip away stalk before finely slicing all the leaves. Bring the cream up to the boil in a small saucepan. At the same time melt the butter in a small pan and stir in the shredded sorrel. As soon as it has collapsed into soggy, khaki-coloured shreds, stir into the cream. Simmer gently for 10 minutes, then season to taste and serve with the fish.
Sorrel
There was a time when the astringent leaves of sorrel (Rumex acetosa) was loved by cooks. As John Evelyn wrote in 1699 in his book Acetaria, A Discourse of Sallets it imparts so grateful a quickness to the rest, as supplies the want of orange, limon and other omphacia [sources of acid taste], and therefore never be excluded. Gradually, citrus fruit replaced sorrel, despite the fact that both it and the more recently introduced French sorrel (R. scutatus) grow like weeds in Britain.
Its sourness is due to the oxalic acid in its green leaves and is best enjoyed either raw in a salad or cooked in a light cream sauce, summer soup or omelette. However, sorrel is also excellent cooked with other sour ingredients like gooseberries or cooking apples. Aside from traditional sweet sour fruit sauces that can accompany herring, mackerel or pork it is also good in puddings such as apple fritters or turnovers.
Reproduced by kind permission of Sybil Kapoor from her book Taste - A New Way to Cook, published by Mitchell Beazley; ISBN: 1 84000 610 2
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