Sorrel soup

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Synthesised from Google · Yelp · Reddit · 3 food blogs · Updated August 2026

The story the reviews tell

Sorrel soup is a green, bracing bowl that belongs to nearly every Eastern European table—Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and beyond. Built on water or broth with fresh sorrel leaves and salt, it gains depth from potatoes, carrots, eggs, and smetana, its sourness coming from oxalic acid that makes the leaf sing. That tang softens when sour cream swirls in, the acid meeting calcium in a gentle chemistry. Served hot or chilled, it's both peasant staple and seasonal comfort, known by a handful of names borrowed from Yiddish and older Slavic roots.

What makes this version distinct

Sorrel soup is made from water or broth, sorrel leaves, and salt. Varieties of the same soup include spinach, garden orache, chard, nettle, and occasionally dandelion, goutweed or ramsons, together with or instead of sorrel. It is known in Ashkenazi Jewish, Belarusian, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Armenian, Georgian, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian cuisines. Its other English names, spelled variously schav, shchav, shav, or shtshav, are borrowed from the Yiddish language, which in turn derives from Slavic languages, like for example Belarusian шчаўе, Russian and Ukrainian щавель, shchavel, Polish szczaw. The soup name comes ultimately from the Proto-Slavic ščаvĭ for sorrel. Due to its commonness as a soup in Eastern European cuisines, it is often called green borscht, as a cousin of the standard, reddish-purple beetroot borscht. In Russia, where shchi (along with or rather than borscht) has been the staple soup, sorrel soup is also called green shchi. In old Russia

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