Have you ever wanted to like something that you just…didn’t. Food, I mean. I’ve always wanted to like those cured black olives, the wrinkly ones. I think they look cool. I think the people who eat them are cool. I think maybe I would ascend to a realm of coolness if I could force my to palate comply and actually enjoy them, but I just don’t.
This leads me to schav. Schav is a chilled sorrel soup that’s sometimes called green borscht. To hear Joan Nathan and Gabrielle Hamilton tell it, it’s pleasantly sour and refreshing. Oh, schav, I want so much to love you! You’re Jewish. You’re soup, chilled soup at that. We should be together, but you taste like slimy lawn clippings to me, and I just can’t get past that.
In this YouTube video of Marcus Gold that I watched for a story I was working on, Gold scoffs, “Who likes Schav!?“ And I found that very comforting. Even he, third generation family member of a brand that makes the stuff seems to find it pretty repellant. He tells a story of a grocery store owner who used to keep a mini fridge under his desk to take midday swigs of schav. Now this guy, I want to meet.
So, I’ve been tinkering with schav-esque soups. In several of the recipes I found online, schav includes potatoes, so I went with that. A chilled potato soup, I can get behind. What I came up with is basically a vichyssoise into which fresh sorrel leaves and sorrel oil have been swirled at the last minute. This saves the sorrel from getting slimy while preserving its more sour-refreshing aspects. It’s mostly potato soup, more of a gateway to schav. One day, I will find a schav I truly love, but until then, it’s vichyschav for me.
Vichyschav
Ingredients
2 tablespoons butter
1 lb Yukon gold potatoes, peeeled and diced
2 leeks, white parts only, thoroughly cleaned and thinly sliced
1-2 quarts vegetable stock (or water)
1/2 cup heavy cream
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 cup packed sorrel leaves + a handful of sorrel leaves (stems removed), for garnish
1/4 cup vegetable oil
Prepare a large bowl over an ice bath for chilling your soup.
Heat butter in a heavy-bottomed stock pot. Add leeks and cook for a couple of minutes, careful not to develop any color. Add potatoes and enough stock or water to cover by an inch, plus salt. Cook for 15-20 minutes until potatoes are cooked through.
Meanwhile, make the sorrel oil by combining 1/2 cup sorrel leaves and vegetable oil in a blender. Blend the shit out of it, and strain through a fine mesh strainer. Set aside.
Back to the soup: Use an immersion blender to blend the soup until it’s completely smooth. Add cream. Taste and adjust seasoning as needed. Chill in an ice bath and/or the fridge.
To plate (bowl), fill bowl with chilled soup, and add a few leaves of sorrel, dragging them through the soup artistically. Drizzle with sorrel oil, and serve very cold.
A post-script for nerds: I can’t help but point out that Vichy was the seat of the nazis in France from 1940-1944, so I take some perverse pleasure in Jewing up their namesake soup, though to be fair and historically accurate, vichyssoise predates the occupation. Its origins are in 19th century France and, according to Wikipedia, “Louis Diat, a French chef at the Ritz-Carlton in New York City who grew up in Montmarault in the Allier department near the spa resort town of Vichy, is most often credited with its reinvention,“ in 1917. It was, supposedly, Julia Child’s favorite soup.