French Omelet
3 eggs. 1 teaspoon lemon juice. 3 tablespoons water. 1 tablespoons butter. 1 scant teaspoon sugar. Dash salt.
Beat yolks very light, add liquid and seasoning. Fold into well beaten whites. Put butter into saucepan, brush sides with butter also. Cook slowly until brown, moving pan all the time. Cut edge with knife when ready to fold. Serve on oblong dish garnished with parsley and small sausage balls.
Despite the name, this is a puffed or foamy omelet rather than the flat rolled French omelette; the whites are beaten separately and the whole thing behaves more like a soufflé. Everything depends on getting it out of the pan before the foam collapses.
- The hinge: low heat, constant motionA foam omelet set over anything but gentle heat browns on the bottom while the middle is still raw batter. Keep the burner low and keep the pan sliding so the butter and egg stay in motion, roughly 4 to 6 minutes until the base is set and light brown.
- "Saucepan" means a skilletRead this as a shallow, sloped skillet or omelet pan rather than a deep saucepan; something around 8 inches suits three eggs. Buttering the sides matters because the foam climbs as it cooks and will stick and tear when you fold.
- Finishing the topThe instruction stops at the browned underside, which leaves the surface wet. Either cover the pan for the last minute or slide it under a broiler for 30 to 60 seconds to set the top before folding.
- Folding, not rollingCutting the edge with a knife loosens the risen collar so the omelet folds in half without cracking. Fold once, in half, and turn it straight onto the warm dish; a puffed omelet begins deflating within a minute.
- The sugar and lemonA scant teaspoon of sugar and a teaspoon of lemon juice make this only faintly sweet, not a dessert. If you are serving it with sausage, leaving both out gives a plain savory version.
- Butter quantity"1 tablespoons butter" is most likely a printing inconsistency; read it as one tablespoon, which suits a pan of this size. Use a little more if the pan is not well seasoned or nonstick.
- Sausage ballsSmall balls of bulk breakfast sausage, pinched to about an inch and browned through in a separate pan while the omelet cooks. Cook them first and keep them warm rather than holding the omelet.
- YieldThree eggs feed two people as a light course, one as a main. Do not scale up in the same pan; the foam will not set evenly. Make a second omelet instead.
Mrs. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and taught cookery in Philadelphia in the 1910s and 1920s. What she calls a French omelet is the puffed or "soufflé" style, in which the whites are whipped and folded in for volume; some American cookbooks of the period used the label French for this style, though others reserved it for the plain folded omelet. The technique is usually traced to the omelette soufflée of nineteenth-century French cookery, which was served sugared as a dessert -- a descent that may explain the pinch of sugar and squeeze of lemon sitting in a recipe finished with sausage balls and parsley.