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OMELET (aux Fines Herbes)
Break six eggs into a basin. Beat them lightly, and mix with them a small pinch of salt and pepper, a heaped tea-spoonful of finely-chopped parsley, and half a tea-spoonful of minced onions, cloves, or shallots. Dissolve two ounces of fresh butter in a hot frying-pan, over a gentle fire. Pour in the mixture, and proceed as already described. Omelets may be extensively varied. A little minced ham, or cooked vegetables, or fish sauce, or jam, may be put in either with the eggs or placed in their centre when they are partially cooked, and the omelet should then be named after the peculiar flavouring. Time to fry, four or five minutes. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A plain French omelet with herbs, written for a cook who has already read the basic omelet entry a page earlier. Two details need translating and one timing needs rethinking.
- "Proceed as already described"The omitted method is presumably the standard one: pour the eggs into foaming butter, keep the pan moving, draw the setting edges toward the centre with a fork until the mass is creamy but still loose on top, then fold or roll it out onto a warm plate. Nothing here works if the pan is crowded, so use a 9- to 10-inch pan for six eggs, or split the mixture into two omelets.
- TimingFour or five minutes over a gentle fire gives a firm, evenly set omelet in the older English style. Current practice is closer to 90 seconds to two minutes over moderately high heat, which leaves the centre soft. Choose one and commit; a long slow cook at high heat gives leather.
- "Onions, cloves, or shallots""Cloves" almost certainly means a clove of garlic rather than the spice, but the text is genuinely ambiguous and Cassell's does not clarify. Half a teaspoon of the dried spice in six eggs would be unpleasant; treat it as garlic or shallot.
- Fines herbesThe classical mix is parsley, chives, chervil and tarragon in roughly equal parts. This version reduces it to parsley plus an allium; a tablespoon of mixed soft herbs is closer to the French original.
- ButterTwo ounces (4 tablespoons, 55 g) is a lot for six eggs and will pool. An ounce is enough in a well-seasoned or nonstick pan; the surplus may have been insurance against sticking in an iron pan.
- Cost and yieldThe eightpence is the book's own "probable cost" and is of historical interest only. Two or three persons is accurate as a light course; as a main dish, six eggs feeds two.
- The jam variationA sweet omelet is not a mistake in the text. It was a standard supper or entremets dish: fold warmed jam into the centre, then dust the top with sifted sugar. Leave out the salt, pepper and herbs if you make it.
Aux fines herbes means simply "with fine herbs", the French kitchen's term for a mixture of tender green herbs added late so their flavour is not cooked away, as distinct from the robust bay-and-thyme bundle used in long braises. The omelet was treated as a foundational exercise: master the plain one, and the named variants follow from the same handful of movements, which is exactly the logic behind "proceed as already described" and the note that an omelet "should then be named after the peculiar flavouring". The dish reached English domestic cookbooks through French professional practice, and the very generous two ounces of butter here may suggest that these instructions assume a heavy iron pan over an open fire or range top rather than a controllable gas flame.