Ingredients & Fine Foods

Garden sorrel (Rumex acetosa) is commonly cultivated in French vegetable patches, and the season is just beginning. It is a sturdy, easy-to-grow leafy plant that comes back year after year, and belongs to the same botanical family as rhubarb and buckwheat, which is always fun to know.

I think of it as being halfway between a green and an herb: its flavor is notably tangy and sour, and sorrel recipes have you eat it raw or gently cooked, but in both cases it is best served in combination with other ingredients, so its pungency won’t overwhelm.

Well used, it is a delight that can really lift a dish, especially in conjunction with a sweet or fatty element.

But the operative phrase here is “well used” and I thought I would turn to you via twitter to hear about your favorite sorrel recipes using the fresh stuff, as I did last year for sage recipes.

Many thanks to all who chimed in; here’s the list of sorrel recipes I compiled, for your use and enjoyment.

(Note: in French, sorrel is oseille and it’s a classic slang word for money, in use since the late nineteenth century. Woody Allen’s 1969 movie Take The Money And Run was released in France under the title “Prends l’oseille et tire-toi.”)

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I recently remarked to a sympathetic friend how difficult it is to buy fresh sage around here. There aren’t many sage recipes in French cuisine, so it’s not part of the classic range of fresh herbs sold at produce shops or at the green market. But I enjoy its flavor very much, so I decided I would try and find seeds to grow my own.

Only days later, I walked past the sidewalk display of Etablissements Lion on my way home, and noticed that they sold potted sage plants that looked exceptionally healthy. I couldn’t resist; I chose the most beautiful one and adopted it.

It now rooms with our blooming strawberry plants on the bathroom window sill, but it is so bushy I thought I’d better start thinking of ideas to put it to good use. And I did what any modern person would do: I turned to twitter and asked, “What do you like to do with sage?”

The response was multicolored and inspired, and I thought it would be a pity not to share it with you. Surely there are other owners of expansive sage plants who would benefit. So here’s a compilation of the suggestions I collected — my sincere thanks go to the twitterers who kindly contributed their ideas.

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The idea of a DIY vanilla extract has been floating around the food blog world for a little while. When I first read about the process, the instructions seemed so fastidious that I shrugged and clicked away. (This is, in passing, one of the challenges the recipe writer faces: providing the necessary dose of guidance, but avoiding instruction overload.)

Still, I was increasingly bothered by the imbalance between the wowing qualities of the vanilla beans I’d splurged on, and the dullness of the store-bought vanilla extract I had on hand. So, why not use the former to create a better version of the latter?

I was increasingly bothered by the imbalance between the wowing vanilla beans I’d splurged on, and the dullness of the store-bought vanilla extract I had on hand. So, why not use the former to create a better version of the latter?

Perhaps some of you will wonder, if I have fresh vanilla beans, why use extract at all? And the answer is that they don’t serve the same purpose. Fresh beans need to be steeped in a liquid ingredient (milk, cream, syrup…) to release their flavor, so they can only be used in recipes that call for such an ingredient, like sauces, ice creams, or custards. Vanilla extract, on the other hand, is ready-to-use and can be added directly, without steeping, to cake batters, cookie doughs, cocktails, etc.

And really, as I found out when I looked into it with a little more attention, making your own extract could not be simpler: place vanilla beans in a jar, fill with liquor, close, shake, and wait. The process is even simpler than preserving your own lemons and you’ll likely wonder, as I did, what took you so long.

Vodka is often mentioned as the ideal liquor for this because its neutral flavor won’t overshadow that of the vanilla, but I opted to use rum, which I like to use in my baking (canelés, crêpes and yogurt cake without rum are like a kiss without a mustache*) and find a perfect match to vanilla. I love the complexity of the resulting extract, but you can use whatever liquor you prefer, provided it is about 40% alcohol.

Commercial vanilla extract is generally sweetened, too, but I see no reason to make the process more complex, and the quantities of extract used in most recipes are so small that it’s unnecessary to make up for the difference in sugar.

And of course, need I mention that homemade vanilla extract makes a great gift for the food enthusiast?

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* “Like a kiss without a mustache” is a literal translation of comme un baiser sans moustache, a French idiom that means that one thing is pointless without the other. Similar, but less perky: comme un violon sans cordes (like a violin without strings) or comme une soupe sans sel (like soup without salt).

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Long-time readers of this blog (and those who sift through the archives while pretending to work) may remember me mentioning that my source of choice for vanilla was a small family-run company based in Mayotte.

Alas, when my sizeable stash dwindled and I decided to place a new order late last year, I found that the online shop had been dormant for months. My email enquiry was left unanswered and, a few weeks later, the website had evaporated. La Vanille de Mayotte had, for all intents and purposes, gone under.

I felt sorry for the owners, as I knew them to be real people (with a young child, too) and I liked their producer-to-consumer approach, but once I’d gotten past this stage, the real, angst-ridden question was: where would my next bean come from?

And then I remembered reading about Alain Abel, who runs a vanilla plantation in Tahiti and has won multiple awards for the exceptional quality of his beans, also acknowledged by the star-spangled list of his professional clients.

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