Home › Eggs › Lightning Omelette
Lightning Omelette
Butter a baking-dish and put in the bottom of it slices of stale bread (brown bread is better than white) which have been dipped in milk. Then put in a layer of very thin slices of Gruyere cheese. Take two eggs, beat them up to a froth, add salt and pepper, pour them into a baking-dish on top of the bread and cheese, then put it in the oven until it is browned on top. Serve hot. Eggs "alla Piacentina" Take the whites of four eggs, and beat until stiff. Then add the yolks and one rounded tablespoon of melted butter, and a little salt and pepper. Take a small baking-dish, butter it well, and put in the bottom a layer or two of very thin slices of cheese, Parmesan or Gruyere. Put into the oven for a few moments until thoroughly heated, then pour on the whites of eggs mixed with the other ingredients, put back in the oven, and serve when the eggs are a golden brown.
Eggs "alla Benedettina" Roast two small peppers, take off their skins, remove the seeds, and cut into strips. Take two tomatoes (not too ripe), boil them, remove the skins and seeds, and cut into thin strips also. Then wash two anchovies, remove the bones, and cut also into strips. Take a small baking-dish, put in the strips of peppers and tomatoes and the anchovies. Add two tablespoons of good olive-oil and put on the top of the stove until the ingredients boil. Then break into the dish four eggs, taking care to keep the yolks whole. Add salt and pepper, and put the dish into the oven until the eggs are cooked. Eggs "alla Romana" Beat four eggs, whites and yolks together. Add one tablespoon of milk or cream, salt and pepper, one tablespoon of grated Parmesan cheese, and a little chopped-up parsley. With this make three or four omelettes about the thickness of a ten-cent piece. As the omelettes are finished lay them on a napkin to cool; then cut them transversely into strips about one-quarter of an inch wide. Then put the strips into a saucepan with some heated butter. Heat them through thoroughly and serve with grated cheese and the following meat sauce poured over them:
Four baked egg dishes run together on one page, none of them with an oven temperature or a timing. All four are quick enough that the oven should be hot and preheated before anything is assembled.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given anywhere on the page. 400F suits all four: hot enough to brown the top of the Lightning Omelette and the alla Piacentina before the eggs overset, and quick enough to firm the whites in the alla Benedettina in 8-10 minutes while the yolks stay soft.
- The hinge — pull them earlyBaked eggs carry over. Take each dish out when the centre still trembles slightly; the residual heat of the buttered dish finishes it. Left until firm throughout in the oven, all four go weeping and rubbery on the way to the table.
- Stale bread and the milk dipThe bread should be genuinely dry, a day or two old, and dipped rather than soaked — a second in the milk each side. Fresh supermarket bread collapses into paste. The wholemeal recommended here holds its shape better and its slight bitterness works against the Gruyère.
- Quantities and yieldThe Lightning Omelette as written is two eggs and serves one, or two at a light supper; scale bread and cheese to fit whatever dish you use. Alla Piacentina and alla Benedettina are four eggs each and serve two.
- AnchoviesThe instruction to wash and bone them means salt-packed anchovies, which need rinsing and filleting. Oil-packed fillets from a tin are already boned and want no washing — use four small ones in place of the two whole fish.
- "Not too ripe" tomatoesUnderripe tomatoes hold their shape and give off less water, which matters in a shallow dish where the eggs must set rather than poach. Boiling here is only to loosen the skins — thirty seconds, then peel, seed and cut into strips.
- Thickness of a ten-cent pieceA dime, so roughly 1/16 inch. The alla Romana omelettes are meant to be thin crêpe-like sheets that can be rolled or stacked and shredded, closer to Italian frittatine than to a folded omelette.
- The missing sauceThe alla Romana entry ends by promising "the following meat sauce", which is not printed with the recipe itself. Any well-reduced ragù works; keep it thick, since a loose sauce turns the shredded omelette to mush.
These four dishes are a small tour of Italian regional egg cookery collected for an English-speaking audience. The place-names are the usual Italian shorthand: alla Piacentina points to Piacenza in Emilia, alla Romana to Rome, and alla Benedettina is generally taken to signal a monastic or Benedictine association, though such names were applied loosely and are rarely traceable to a particular house. The Lightning Omelette is not an omelette at all but a layered bread-and-cheese bake, the kind of thing later English cooks would recognise as a savoury bread pudding; the name presumably refers to the speed of assembly, everything in it being bread, milk, cheese and eggs likely already in the house. The alla Benedettina — peppers, tomatoes, anchovy and oil brought to a boil, then eggs broken in — works on the same principle as the southern uova in purgatorio, eggs set directly in a simmering sauce.