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Salt and Pepper (Parsley Shalot Break three)
Parsley. Shalot. Break three eggs into a basin and whip them ; add pepper and salt to taste. Chop finely a teaspoonful of parsley and a very small piece of shalot and add that. Melt one ounce of butter in an omelet- or frying-pan and fry the shalot in it; then pour in the eggs; stir quickly with a spoon, and shake the pan to prevent the omelet sticking.
Turn it quickly towards the outside of the pan, turn it over for a second, and then place on to a hot dish.
A plain French herb omelette, written as a working cook would have said it aloud. The instructions are compressed, and the crucial detail — high heat and under a minute of cooking — is left unsaid.
- The title is a printing artefactThe heading "Salt and Pepper (Parsley Shalot Break three)" is the indexer's fragment of the opening lines, not a dish name. What follows is an omelette aux fines herbes for one person.
- ShalotAn older spelling of shallot. "A very small piece" is perhaps a teaspoon, finely chopped; much more than that would add unwanted moisture and sweetness.
- Cook the shallot brieflyRaw shallot in a fast omelette stays harsh, but the butter should not colour either. Twenty to thirty seconds in the foaming butter over medium heat is enough, then raise the heat before the eggs go in.
- Pan and quantityOne ounce of butter (2 tablespoons) is generous for three eggs by modern habit, and appropriate here — it is what keeps the omelette from catching. Use a 20–22 cm (8–9 in) pan; anything wider and three eggs spread too thin to roll.
- Heat and timingThe recipe's "quickly" is the hinge. The pan wants to be hot enough that the eggs set at the edges on contact; the whole thing is done in 30–45 seconds, while the centre is still glossy. Held longer it becomes rubbery and weeps.
- "Turn it over for a second"Most likely the fold rather than a flip: push the set egg from the far side of the pan towards you into a roll, let it rest seam-down for a moment, then tip it onto the plate.
- YieldThree eggs serve one as a course on its own, or two if part of a larger meal. Omelettes do not scale in the pan — cook them one at a time.
The fines herbes omelette turns on nothing but timing and control of the pan: no rare ingredient, no long process. Late Victorian and Edwardian "high class" manuals, written for cooks in service in large households, print many of these terse French savouries for readers already trained, so the text records only the sequence, not the technique. The spelling "shalot" appears in British kitchen books into the twentieth century; the word itself is generally traced through French eschalotte to Ascalon in the Levant, the town with which the onion was traditionally associated.