A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1235 entries
sorrel
Sorrel is a leafy perennial of grassland and roadside with arrow-shaped leaves and a sharp lemon taste from the oxalic acid in them. Common sorrel grows a foot or two with tall spikes of small reddish flowers; sheep’s sorrel is smaller and grows on acid ground, turning whole fields rust-red in early summer. The same word also names a light reddish-brown horse color.
Etymology
The plant name came into English from Old French, and behind it is a Germanic word meaning sour, which is what the leaf is. The horse color is a separate borrowing from French, from a word meaning reddish-brown, and the two are unrelated apart from arriving by the same route.
Notes
Sorrel is one of the oldest wild greens in European cooking and was a standard sauce herb long before lemons were affordable, used with fish, in soup, and in the French sauce that still carries its name. The oxalic acid is the reason it is eaten in quantity by nobody, and sheep’s sorrel appearing in a pasture in numbers is a straightforward indicator that the soil has gone acid.