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Additions Which Dress Up the Light Omelet
Three tablespoons fresh mushrooms, peeled, chopped and fried lightly in just enough shortening to keep from sticking; 1 cup stewed kidney. Serve with tomato sauce, adding to it extra gravy from kidneys; three sardines skinned and boned, broken into bits and seasoned lightly with cayenne and lemon juice; 1/2 cup Lyonnaise potato.
This is a set of four separate fillings for a plain folded omelet, not one combined mixture; each quantity is meant for a single two- or three-egg omelet serving one person.
- Read it as four optionsMushroom, kidney, sardine and Lyonnaise potato are alternatives, each with its own quantity. The tomato sauce instruction belongs to the kidney version only.
- Peeling mushroomsThe direction assumes open field or large flat mushrooms, whose skins can be leathery. Cultivated white or cremini mushrooms need only a wipe; peeling them wastes flavour.
- "Shortening"In a book of this period this simply means fat of any kind. Butter is the natural choice here, and mushrooms want a hot pan and room to spread so they colour instead of stewing.
- Stewed kidneyThe recipe does not say which kidney; lamb, veal or beef would all fit. Halve it, snip out the white core, then simmer until tender rather than boiling hard. Cook it through; kidney offal is not a candidate for pink service. Soaking in milk or acidulated water first is a common way to soften the strong smell.
- SardinesMost likely tinned in oil, though the direction to skin and bone them would suit fresh sardines equally. Lift out the backbone with the point of a knife, drain them well so the omelet does not go greasy, and go carefully with the cayenne against an already salty fish.
- Lyonnaise potatoCooked potato sliced and fried with onion until both are browned. Use potato boiled the day before and thoroughly cooled, or the slices break up in the pan.
- Getting the filling inHave every addition hot and ready before the eggs go into the pan. Spoon it down the centre when the omelet is still slightly loose on top, then fold and turn out at once.
Omelet variations of this kind were a common feature of American cookery writing from the late nineteenth century onward, following the French practice of naming an omelet for whatever is folded into it. The four suggestions read as a snapshot of an early-twentieth-century pantry: fresh mushrooms as a modest luxury, tinned sardines as a reliable store-cupboard protein, cooked Lyonnaise potato of the kind that would be left over from a previous meal, and kidney, which was cheap and widely eaten before organ meats fell out of American favour later in the century.