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Asparagus Omelet
One pound of asparagus, three eggs, two tablespoons of cream and a little salt. Boil the asparagus in as little water as possible; then chop it fine, mix it with the eggs (well beaten) and cream. Fry in butter and serve hot.
— Mrs. Frank Richardson
A plain three-egg omelet with cooked asparagus folded through the raw egg rather than laid on top. The recipe assumes you know how to handle a pan, so the useful notes are about the asparagus.
- The hinge: drain the asparagus dryBoiling "in as little water as possible" may be thrift, but it also keeps the asparagus from waterlogging. Chopped asparagus still carrying water will weep into the eggs and give you a loose, greyish scramble instead of a set omelet. Drain it, then let it steam dry a minute in the hot pan before it meets the eggs.
- Asparagus timingA pound of trimmed spears needs 3-5 minutes in salted water, rather than the long boiling many period recipes call for; take them out while still bright and just yielding.
- TrimmingA pound as bought is not a pound of edible asparagus. Snap or cut off the woody ends and peel thick stalks, which leaves roughly 12 oz to chop.
- CreamCream of this period was not standardised and could run anywhere from light to heavy by modern measure. Either works; the heavier the cream, the more tender the set.
- Butter and heat"Fry in butter" means a generous tablespoon or more in a 9- or 10-inch pan over medium heat. Butter alone browns quickly, so keep the heat moderate and pull the omelet while the centre is still slightly soft.
- YieldThree eggs feeds two as a light supper or lunch dish, one as a full meal. Doubling is better done as two omelets than one large one.
- Seasoning"A little salt" is about a quarter teaspoon in the eggs; pepper is not mentioned but is worth adding.
Asparagus was a spring luxury with a very short window, and cookbooks of this era treat it accordingly: nothing is wasted, the cooking water is kept minimal, and the trimmings and stalk ends often went into soup. Folding vegetables into the beaten egg rather than filling the omelet is often said to be the older, more rustic form of the dish, and it is certainly closer to a Spanish tortilla or an Italian frittata than to the French rolled omelet that dominated later restaurant cooking. The signed attribution places this in the collected-contributions tradition of American community cookbooks, which raised money for churches, libraries and village improvement societies and recorded what local households actually cooked rather than what a professional thought they should. Recipes in these books are typically brief.