Home › Pastry › Three Eggs (Piece of Shalot)
Three Eggs (Piece of Shalot)
A piece of Shalot.
One Tomato. One ounce and a half of Butter.
Skin the tomato, cut it up into small pieces, with a piece of shalot chopped up. Take the eggs, beat the yolks and whites together; sauté the tomato and shalot in half the quantity of butter, season with pepper and salt and keep hot.
Put the remainder of the butter in an omelet-pan, when hot stir in the beaten eggs, previously seasoned, and proceed the same as for Savoury Omelet. When set, put the prepared tomatoes in the centre, fold over, turn out on a dish, and serve with a tablespoonful of tomato sauce round the omelet.
A tomato omelette for three eggs, written for a cook who already knows the house method for a savoury omelette. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, so a little reconstruction is needed before you start.
- The missing tomatoThe heading gives only the eggs, the shallot and the butter, but the method calls for a tomato that was never listed. One medium ripe tomato, skinned and diced, is the right amount for three eggs; two makes the filling wet enough to split the omelette.
- ShalotAn older spelling of shallot. "A piece of shalot" means a fragment rather than a whole bulb — about a teaspoon, finely chopped, is enough for three eggs. More and it dominates the tomato.
- An ounce and a half of butterRoughly 3 tablespoons, or about 42 g, split evenly: half to cook the tomato, half in the omelette pan. That is generous by modern standards, so resist cutting it.
- Skinning the tomatoA cross-cut and thirty seconds in boiling water, then cold water, slips the skin off cleanly. It matters here because unskinned pieces curl into tough shreds inside the fold.
- Dry the fillingThis is the hinge. Sauté the tomato and shallot until the free liquid has gone and the mixture holds together on the spoon — a watery filling soaks the eggs and the omelette will tear when folded.
- "Proceed the same as for Savoury Omelet"The instruction points back to the book's own omelette method, which is not reproduced here: in general terms, hot pan, eggs poured in, stirred briefly, then the setting curd drawn from the edge to the centre while the pan is tilted. It cooks quickly, and the recipe's cue for adding the filling is simply "when set".
- Tomato sauceA tablespoonful spooned around, not over, the omelette, as the recipe specifies. Any plain cooked tomato sauce serves; period tomato sauces were generally sieved and plain rather than herbed Italian-style sugo, though the thickening varied from book to book.
- YieldOne omelette, serving one as a light main course or two as part of a larger meal. Made larger it will not fold, so cook a second rather than scaling up.
Omelettes of this kind fill several pages of late-Victorian and Edwardian professional cookery books, often arranged by the number of eggs rather than by name, the omelette being an item a cook could be expected to turn out to order for luncheon or supper. The formula is French in descent — the technique, the pan and the word itself — filtered through English kitchens and cookery schools. The shallot rather than onion, and the separate tomato sauce round the dish, both suggest a book written for cooks with a stocked larder and sauces already to hand.