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Spanish Omelet
1 green pepper, 1 red pepper, 1 onion, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 6 mushrooms, 6 eggs, 6 tablespoons water, salt and pepper to taste. Put 1/2 Crisco in saucepan, add onion chopped very fine, mushrooms and red and green pepper; cover, cook slowly for 20 minutes. Make plain omelet from rest of ingredients; turn this out on heated dish, fill ends of dish or platter with Spanish sauce, and send it to table. This omelet can be made very handsome by saving 1/4 of green and red pepper, cutting it into fancy shapes to use a garnish for top of omelet.
A straightforward folded omelet served with a slow-cooked pepper and mushroom garnish alongside rather than inside it. The recipe assumes you already know how to make a plain omelet, so the only real technique is the vegetable mixture.
- The hinge: cook the peppers low and coveredTwenty minutes covered over low heat is not a mistake — it sweats the onion and peppers down to a soft, sweet mixture rather than browning them. Left uncovered or over high heat they will scorch before they soften.
- CriscoAn all-vegetable shortening; this book was published by its maker, which is why it turns up in recipe after recipe. Butter or olive oil works in both the vegetables and the omelet pan, and either gives more flavour.
- Quantities of fatHalf of 3 tablespoons is an awkward measure; use 1½ tablespoons for the vegetables and the rest for the pan. A tablespoon in the pan is plenty for a well-seasoned or nonstick skillet.
- The eggs and waterSix eggs beaten with 6 tablespoons water makes a light, slightly steamy omelet — water was common in period American omelets where milk would often be used today. Cook in a 10-inch pan; six eggs will be thick and slow in anything smaller.
- "Spanish sauce"Here it means only the cooked pepper, onion and mushroom mixture. There is no tomato in it, despite what the name suggests to modern ears; add a chopped tomato at the end if you want the version most people expect.
- MushroomsThe recipe does not say what kind; small cultivated button mushrooms are the likeliest reading, which would be somewhere around 3 to 4 ounces. Slice them thin so they release their liquid within the covered cooking time.
- YieldA six-egg omelet serves three, or two generously. Have the dish and the vegetable mixture hot and ready before the eggs go in the pan; the omelet will not wait.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, introduced in 1911 as the first widely marketed all-vegetable shortening — which is why a fat with no particular affinity for eggs turns up in an omelet. The dish itself belongs to a long American habit of calling anything with sweet peppers and onions "Spanish," a usage whose origins are uncertain but which has little to do with Spain, where a tortilla española is a thick potato and onion cake cooked through and served in wedges. What is described here is a French-style folded omelet with a vegetable garnish set at the ends of the platter, and the closing note about cutting reserved pepper into fancy shapes reads as pure period table-manner.