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Gardener's Omelet
Beat half a dozen eggs, season them with pepper and salt, and mix in some finely-minced vegetables-either salad, green peas, French beans, powdered herbs, or whatever the season affords. Green peas and French beans must be cooked before they are mixed with the eggs. Make the omelet in the usual way. Time to fry, three or four minutes. Probable cost, 8d., exclusive of the vegetables. Sufficient for four persons.
A flexible six-egg omelet built around whatever vegetables are on hand. The only fixed rules are that firm vegetables go in cooked and the pan goes in hot.
- "Make the omelet in the usual way"Cassell's assumes you know the method: a heavy pan over fairly high heat, a good knob of butter until it foams and just begins to colour, the eggs poured in, then stirred and lifted at the edges until the base sets and the centre is still loose. Fold and turn out immediately; the residual heat finishes it.
- Size and panSix eggs is a lot for one pan if you want a tender omelet. Either use a 12-inch skillet, or split the mixture and make two omelets in an 8-9 inch pan.
- Vegetables must be dryThe unstated hinge. Peas, beans or salad leaves carrying water will weep into the eggs and give a grey, loose omelet. Cook them ahead, drain thoroughly, and pat dry before mixing in.
- French beansThe green bean, not a dried haricot. Cut into short lengths and boil until just tender before they go anywhere near the eggs.
- "Either salad"Meaning lettuce, sorrel, watercress or similar leaves, shredded fine and used raw; they wilt in the pan. Sorrel in particular was a standard omelet green in this period.
- "Powdered herbs"Dried herbs rubbed to a powder, a practical way of carrying herbs through the winter. Fresh chervil, parsley, chives and tarragon, finely chopped, give a far better result and are closer to what the recipe wants in season.
- TimingThree or four minutes is for the whole omelet from pouring to folding, not per side. Anything longer and the eggs tighten and squeak.
- Cost and yield8d. is Victorian pence, and covers only the eggs and seasoning, the vegetables being explicitly excluded. Four servings from six eggs is generous by modern standards if there is anything else on the table; three is more realistic as a main course.
The name is a kitchen convention rather than a place or a person: like à la jardinière, it signals that the dish is carried by garden vegetables, whatever the plot happens to be yielding. The recipe is a template rather than a fixed formula, which is how nineteenth-century household books handled the problem of seasonality before reliable year-round produce. The instruction to use "whatever the season affords" is doing real work in a book written for cooks whose green peas and French beans existed for a few weeks a year, and whose fallback in January was a jar of herbs dried and powdered the previous summer.