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Spanish Omelet
Use recipe for French Omelet, and garnish with Spanish sauce. Spanish sauce is made by sautéing two tablespoons each of chopped onion, green pepper, a clove of garlic, in four tablespoons butter until yellow; add one cup of tomato. Season with salt, pepper and cayenne, and cook until thick. One half cup mushrooms sautéd with onions is an improvement.
A sauce recipe with an omelet attached — the omelet itself is elsewhere in the book, so the work here is all in the pan of tomato, onion and pepper. Make the sauce first and hold it warm; a French omelet takes under two minutes and will not wait.
- "One cup of tomato"Ambiguous in the original: it could mean fresh peeled and chopped tomato or the canned tomato that was standard pantry stock by 1907. Either works, but canned crushed tomato reduces to a thick sauce faster and more reliably out of season.
- Four tablespoons butterThat is half a stick for four tablespoons of aromatics — generous by modern habit but it is what carries the sauce. Two tablespoons is enough if you would rather, though the sauce will be thinner in body.
- "Until yellow"Means softened and just beginning to take colour, not browned. Keep the heat moderate; scorched garlic will dominate the finished sauce.
- Cook until thickExpect 10 to 15 minutes at a simmer. The sauce should mound on a spoon rather than run, or it will flood the plate and soak the omelet.
- The garlicOne clove, listed with the chopped onion and pepper and so presumably chopped too, going into the butter at the start. If you prefer it less assertive, add it a minute after the onion and pepper, or leave it whole and fish it out.
- CayenneUsed here as the heat rather than the green pepper, which in this period meant a sweet bell pepper. A pinch is the intent, not a teaspoon.
- MushroomsThe optional half cup should be sliced and given room in the pan — crowded, they steam instead of browning, and their liquid will slacken the sauce you have just thickened.
- YieldThe finished sauce comes to roughly a cupful, about right for a two- or three-egg omelet. It doubles without adjustment; refrigerate leftovers and use within a few days.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard — a promotional cookbook that ranged well past confectionery into a full domestic repertoire. "Spanish" in American cookery of this era rarely meant Spain itself; it was a general label for anything built on tomato, onion, sweet pepper and a little heat, and Spanish sauce, Spanish rice and Spanish omelet all trade on the same trio. The French omelet it refers to — rolled, barely set, cooked fast in butter — was one of the two standard forms in American cookbooks of the period, alongside the thicker puffed omelet.