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PRESERVED FRUIT, OMELET OF (a French recipe)
Beat the whites and yolks of six eggs separately; add a little zest of lemon to the latter; then mix the two together, beating them well, with a little cream, and two table-spoonfuls of apple marmalade, apricot, gooseberry, or any fruit you have. Pour the mixture into the pan; sugar it when in the pan; turn it topsyturvy into a plate; put it on a dish, cover the surface thickly with powdered sugar, and brown it with the salamander.
A sweet soufflé-style omelet with jam folded through, finished with a caramelised sugar crust. The instructions assume an open fire and a salamander, and they skip quantities for the cream.
- Pan and quantitySix eggs is a large omelet for one pan; a 10-inch nonstick or well-seasoned skillet is the minimum. It serves three or four as a dessert. Cook in butter over medium heat rather than the fierce heat you would use for a savoury omelet, or the sugar in the jam will scorch.
- "A little cream"Unspecified in the original. One to two tablespoons is enough; more and the beaten whites cannot support the mixture and it turns to scrambled custard.
- Zest of lemon"Zest" here means the outer peel pared thin and either finely chopped or rubbed off with a lump of sugar. Modern grated zest from half a lemon is the equivalent.
- Apple marmaladeNot citrus marmalade — a thick, sweetened apple purée closer to what is now sold as apple butter. Any stiff, low-liquid preserve works; a runny jam will weep and make the omelet soggy.
- The hinge: fold, do not beatThe recipe says to beat the whites and yolks together, but the lift depends on the whites keeping their air. Fold the yolk mixture and the preserve into the whites in two or three additions and get it into the pan immediately.
- "Turn it topsyturvy"Slide or invert the omelet out so the set underside faces up — that browned face is the one you sugar and glaze. Do not fold it in half as you would a plain omelet.
- The salamanderA flat iron disc on a handle, heated in the fire and held above the sugar to caramelise it. A cook's blowtorch does the same job; a very hot broiler works if the omelet is on a heatproof dish and watched constantly, since the crust colours in under a minute.
- DonenessThe centre should still be slightly loose when it leaves the pan — it carries on setting on the plate and under the glaze. Cooked through in the pan, it deflates and turns rubbery.
Sweet omelets belong to an older order of dining in which eggs were as much a dessert as a savoury course, and the omelette aux confitures was a standard entremets in nineteenth-century French practice — quick to assemble from a jar of preserve and a few eggs, and showy enough to close a meal. Cassell's flags the dish as "a French recipe", a tag a good many of the dictionary's entries carry. The finish with the salamander is the older ancestor of the modern blowtorch, and the same trick of sugar caramelised on a soft egg mixture links this omelet to burnt cream, which appears in English cookbooks — Smith's Compleat Housewife and its successors — well before the word brûlée became familiar.