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Old and New Palace: California
OYSTER OMELET (For two): Take six eggs, one hundred California oysters, one small onion, one tablespoonful of butter, one tablespoonful of flour, salt and pepper to taste. Beat the eggs to a and stir in the onion chopped fine. Put the eggs into an omelet pan over a slow fire. Mix the flour and butter to a soft paste with a little cream, and stir in with the oysters, adding salt and pepper to taste. When the eggs begin to stiffen pour the oysters over and turn the omelet together. Serve on hot plate with a dash of paprika.
This is the recipe of Ernest Arbogast, the chef for many years of the old Palace. The slightly coppery taste of the California oysters gives a piquancy to the flavor of the omelet that can be obtained in no other way, and those who once ate of Arbogast's California oyster omelet, invariably called for it again and again.
We asked Jules Dauviller, the present chef of the Palace, for the recipe of what he considered the best dish now prepared at the Palace and he said he would give us two, as it was difficult to decide which was the best and most distinctive. These are the recipes as he wrote them for us:
Trim some select fillet mignon of beef, about four ounces of each, nicely. Saute these in a frying pan with clarified butter on a hot fire. Dress on a small round PLANKED FILLET MIGNON plank, about four and a half inches in diameter, decorated with a border of mashed potatoes. Over the fillet mignon pour stuffed pimentoes, covered with a sauce made of fresh mushrooms, sauteed sec over which has been poured a little chateaubriand sauce. Serve chateaubriand sauce in a bowl. The second is:
COLD FILLET OF SAND-DABS, PALACE Select six nice fresh sand-dabs. Raise the fillets from the bone, skin and pare nicely, and season with salt and paprika.
Three Palace Hotel recipes as printed, two of them left incomplete by the original typesetting. The omelet is workable as written once you understand what a "California oyster" was.
- One hundred oystersThe California oyster of 1914 was the native Olympia, Ostrea lurida, roughly the size of a thumbnail — a hundred of them is about a cup of shucked meat. With today's Pacific or Atlantic oysters, use a half-pint to a cup of the smallest you can find, halved if large.
- The coppery tasteEdwords is not imagining it. Olympias carry a distinct metallic, almost coppery finish that Pacific oysters lack. Kumamotos are the closest widely sold substitute in size and sweetness, though they are milder.
- Do not cook the oysters twiceThe oysters go into the butter-flour-cream paste only long enough to heat through, a minute or two, and then straight onto the setting eggs. Oysters held in a hot sauce while the omelet cooks will be firm and shrunken by the time it reaches the plate.
- "Beat the eggs to a"The original line is broken; the missing word is most likely "froth." Six eggs for two people is generous by modern standards and produces a thick omelet — a slow fire, as directed, is essential or the bottom sets before the center moves.
- Sauté "sec"In the mushroom sauce this means sautéed dry — mushrooms cooked in fat until their liquid has evaporated entirely, before the sauce goes in. Chateaubriand sauce is a shallot-and-white-wine reduction finished with demi-glace, butter and tarragon.
- PlanksA four-and-a-half-inch cooking plank is hardwood, usually oiled and seasoned before its first use, and the piped mashed potato border is generally said to hold the juices and protect the exposed wood. A small oven-safe dish works if you have no plank; here the plank is serving presentation, since the fillet is already sautéed.
- Sand-dabsPacific sand-dabs are a small West Coast flatfish, still sold in Bay Area markets. The recipe as printed stops after the seasoning step, so it cannot be followed to a finished dish — treat it as a fragment. Petrale sole or any small flounder fillets stand in for the fish itself.
- YieldThe omelet is stated for two. The fillet mignon is portioned at four ounces per plank, so scale by the number of diners.
Clarence Edwords published Bohemian San Francisco in 1914, part elegy and part guidebook, written in the years after the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed the original Palace Hotel on Market Street; the rebuilt Palace opened in 1909, which is the "new" of this chapter's title. Ernest Arbogast, the old Palace's longtime chef, is the man traditionally credited with Oysters Kirkpatrick, named for hotel manager John C. Kirkpatrick, and Edwords is clearly collecting his dishes before the memory of them faded with the building. The tiny native Olympia oyster he praises was once so abundant in San Francisco Bay and Puget Sound that it was shipped south by the barrel; later pollution, dredging and the introduction of faster-growing Pacific oysters would reduce it to a specialty item. Edwords himself is describing a flavor that, as he insists, "can be obtained in no other way."