We arrived after several sweaty hours of riding down country highways in the sun baked old Chrysler. Its fishbowl design not offering much shade. I was ten years old and the luxury of riding in air conditioned comfort was still quite a few years off for our family. We turned off the highway and onto a bumpy dirt road marked only by a hand painted sign leaning on a rusty mailbox. The words " FRESH CORN" and "TOMATO'S" printed in dark paint on white plasterboard. The car lurched to a stop. The dust cloud raised by driving down the unpaved path caught up to us and engulfed our car after just a few short seconds on this bumpy lane. I opened my door and a searing combination of bright un-shaded mid-day sun and swirling dry tan dirt forced my eyes closed as I left the car. I heard the driver's door slam shut. As I wiped the grit from my face and opened my eyes I saw Dad, focused and obviously unfazed by sun or dust, already halfway to the worn whitewashed farm stand. He was on a quest and I was his Sancho Panza. Only this Don Quixote wasn't looking for damsels or windmills, he was on the hunt for a leafy green vegetable he called schav.
Hunting Schav, Sour Grass or fresh sorrel (its more common name) was as much a summer ritual as mowing the lawn or playing golf was to most other Dads. He wasn't completely compulsive about it, just almost. This summertime pursuit was one of my father's lesser known obsessions. He was farm stand junkie anyway and wouldn’t think twice about a half hour detour from his day if it meant it would take him past a farm stand. He had a connection to farm stands that went beyond just the produce I think. These direct sales outlets connected him to a time when as a child his family lived on a farm. We weren't country folk by any stretch of the imagination mind you. Both he and mother were raised on the Westside of Chicago. An as urban and Jewish a neighborhood as you could find outside of Brooklyn. But there was a time in his youth that his family lived on a farm in Michigan and that was enough for him to keep a love of the land for the rest of his days. No matter what job he had, and he had several from what I remember, he would often manage to wind up far enough out in the country sometime during the day to find a farm stand. He would arrive home with a huge smile and armloads filled with bags of sweet corn, tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, cucumbers and such. But his biggest grins came whenever he was able to fetch home, at the height of summer, a cache of the prized schav.
This quest started when he was a young man, with a recipe passed on to him from his mother and continued by him through the years. The recipe was planted in his head by watching her prepare it every year during the sweltering part of summer. She brought this recipe for cold borscht with her from Eastern Europe along with my uncles, Dad’s older brothers, and a satchel of copper pans. The borscht was best made with sorrel but over the years, and with Mom's modern inventions, sorrel had gradually been replaced by ordinary spinach. He learned to love it, but it wasn't the same to him. Every opportunity he had to find the real ingredient, he took it. It was even something he took with him when he and mom retired to Palm Springs, California. His search pattern then would haunt the farm stands and markets of Riverside County and the Imperial Valley. A habit he kept until he was no longer able to drive.
Today, French sorrel as we know it is relatively easy to find. It appears in upscale markets, trendy restaurants and the pages of fashionable food magazines. In fact, it wasn't until many years after our visit to that dusty roadside stand that I finally made the connection of schav to sorrel. I was a young cook in a French restaurant kitchen. The Chef was one of my first mentors and was very happy to teach me every trick and technique he could. One day he was showing me his recipe for a classic French Sorrel Soup. I was busy with another project when he started so didn’t see the preparation. He called me to his stove to explain what he was doing and offered me a spoon. After my first taste I remember shouting out to the amazement of the Chef and kitchen staff around me, "that's Schav".
