Name: Spring Vegetable Soup
Yield: Serves 4
Ingredients: 1 hard lettuce, cored and shredded; 1 litre (1¾ pints) water; 30 g (1¼) butter; salt and pepper; 3-4 onions, thinly sliced; 100 g (3½ oz) purslane or watercress, chopped; crusts of bread, as liked; 500 g (18 oz) green peas, shelled (for this recipe ideally you should use fresh green peas, but if you don’t have them I find you can make it perfectly well with frozen ones); 60 g (2½ oz) chervil, chopped (if you don’t have chervil, use parsley); 1 tablespoon chopped parsley; 2 egg yolks; 250 g (9 oz) sorrel, shredded (if you don’t have access to sorrel, then I suggest you use lemon juice in the soup)

Preparation info

Serves
4

Difficulty
Easy

Appears in

Potty!

By Clarissa Dickson Wright

Published 2010

About

This is a lovely, fresh soup for spring. It was probably historically eaten as an antiscorbutic as most people came out of the winter with incipient scurvy. It calls for the use of purslane, which has the texture of watercress and a lemony flavour. If you don’t have purslane, either growing wild where you live or growing in your fields or vegetable garden, then use watercress.