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Asparagus Cream Omelet
Stir one heaping tablespoon of butter and same amount of flour together. Set the saucepan over the fire, and when well blended, add one cup of milk; stir until smooth, add a teaspoon of chopped parsley, remove from the fire and cool. Beat three eggs separately, the whites to a stiff froth; add the yolks to the cold sauce with a teaspoon of salt and a dash of cayenne; add also one cup of cooked asparagus tips and the stiffly beaten whites. Put a tablespoon of butter in a hot frying pan. When it is brown, pour in the mixture, break it in places with a fork to allow the uncooked portion to run down. When it is set, place in a hot oven for five minutes, double over and serve.
This is a soufflé omelet built on a thick béchamel rather than a plain beaten-egg omelet, which changes how it behaves in the pan. A few of the original's directions assume a cast-iron skillet over coal and a cook who knows what a folded egg white should look like.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirThe whites go in last and should be folded through in a few strokes, leaving the mixture visibly streaky rather than uniform. Beating them into the sauce collapses the air and gives a dense, wet omelet instead of a puffed one.
- Cool the sauce properly"Remove from the fire and cool" means genuinely cool to the touch, not merely off the heat. A warm sauce will set the yolks and slacken the whites the moment they meet.
- Hot ovenRead this as 400-425F. Five minutes is enough to set the top of a shallow omelet; longer and the whites weep.
- Use an oven-safe panThe omelet goes from burner to oven, so a 9- or 10-inch skillet with a metal handle is required. Nonstick or well-seasoned cast iron both work.
- "When it is brown"The butter should reach the nut-brown, foam-subsided stage, not dark brown. Butter goes from browned to burnt in well under a minute over the higher heat of a modern burner.
- The salt is heavyA full teaspoon of salt for three eggs and a cup of milk is heavy to modern taste. Half a teaspoon is nearer the mark, adjusted after the asparagus goes in.
- Asparagus tipsA cup of tips takes something like a bunch of asparagus once the stalks are trimmed away; blanch until just tender and drain dry. Wet asparagus thins the sauce and weighs down the whites.
- Breaking it with a forkThat instruction belongs to a flat omelet. Here, use it sparingly at the very start, only to let the loosest batter reach the pan, then leave the surface alone so it can rise.
- YieldThree eggs and a cup of sauce serve two generously, or three as part of a larger meal. It falls within a couple of minutes of leaving the oven, so bring it to the table at once.
Egg dishes lightened with a white sauce and beaten whites were common in late nineteenth-century American cookery, close kin to the French omelette mousseline. Part of the appeal was economy as much as elegance: a cup of milk thickened with butter and flour stretches three eggs into a dish for a family, and the same base could carry cheese, mushrooms, minced ham or whatever the garden gave up. Asparagus had a short, celebrated spring season before refrigerated rail shipping made it a year-round item, and a recipe like this was one way to make a modest bundle of tips the centerpiece of a supper or a ladies' luncheon rather than a side dish.