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Grune Sosse: The Seven-Herb Green Sauce Frankfurt Calls Its Own
Made from seven fresh herbs and served cold with eggs and potatoes, Frankfurt's Grune Sosse is a regional speciality with its own festival. A guide to the local dish.
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Ask a Frankfurter to name the city's signature dish and many will point not to a meat or a pastry but to a sauce. Frankfurter Grune Sosse, or green sauce, is a cold herb sauce that has become one of the strongest culinary symbols of the city and the surrounding region of Hesse.
The defining feature is the mix of seven fresh herbs. The traditional recipe calls for borage, sorrel, garden cress, chervil, chives, parsley and salad burnet, blended into a base of soured cream, quark or yoghurt with oil, vinegar and seasoning. The exact proportions vary from family to family and from restaurant to restaurant, but the requirement of seven herbs is treated almost as a rule.
Grune Sosse is served cold, most classically with boiled potatoes and halved hard-boiled eggs, a combination known locally as Grie Sosse mit Ei un Grumbeere. It also appears alongside schnitzel and boiled beef. The dish is closely tied to spring, when the fresh herbs come into season, though it is now available for much of the year.
The speciality has protected status within the European Union, which ties the name to herbs grown in the Frankfurt area. The city celebrates the dish each year with a Grune Sosse festival, where producers and cooks compete and visitors sample different versions side by side.
For visitors, ordering green sauce in a traditional restaurant or apple-wine tavern is one of the simplest ways to taste local Frankfurt cooking. It is inexpensive, meat-free in its classic form, and unmistakably regional, which is exactly why the city is so proud of it.
The herbs themselves are a local trade. Bundles of the seven varieties are sold ready-mixed in Frankfurt markets, notably the Kleinmarkthalle in the city centre, especially in spring when demand peaks around Easter. Frankfurt has even given the sauce a monument: in the suburb of Oberrad, a traditional growing area for the herbs, a set of small greenhouse-shaped sculptures stands as a tribute to the dish and the gardeners who supply it. For visitors, tasting green sauce is less about a single recipe than about sampling the many versions that local cooks defend as the correct one.