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Asparagus Omelette
This is made quite differently. Cook the asparagus-tops in salt and water and drain them Roll them in a little bechamel sauce. Break your eggs into the pan into which you have put a little butter; stir them with a fork in your left hand, adding salt and pepper with your right. This will only take a minute. Add the asparagus-tops in the thick sauce; this will take another minute. Roll or fold up the omelette and slip it on a hot buttered dish.
A two-minute omelette whose only real work happens before the pan gets hot. Have the asparagus cooked, drained and bound in sauce before you break an egg.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. For one omelette, figure 3 eggs, about 15 g butter, and 8-10 asparagus tips cut to 4-5 cm, bound with 2 tablespoons of thick bechamel. Serves one, or two as a light starter.
- BechamelMake it stiffer than a pouring sauce - roughly 15 g butter, 15 g flour, 150 ml milk, simmered a few minutes to lose the raw flour taste. Loose sauce will weep into the eggs and prevent the omelette from folding.
- Asparagus topsBoil the tips in well-salted water for 2-3 minutes only, then drain very thoroughly and let them steam dry. Water clinging to the spears will thin the sauce and make the omelette hard to fold.
- "This is made quite differently"The phrase appears to distinguish this from the book's other omelette recipes: here the filling goes in as a sauced garnish at the end rather than being beaten through the raw egg.
- Heat and timingThe one-minute-plus-one-minute schedule is accurate and assumes a hot pan over a brisk flame. Medium-high heat, butter foaming but not browning; keep the eggs moving until they are set in curds with a still-glossy surface, add the filling, count to sixty, fold.
- "Fork in your left hand"One hand stirs while the other seasons, exactly as the recipe describes. A modern silicone spatula does the same job without scarring a non-stick surface.
- ServingThe hot buttered dish matters, as the recipe specifies: warm the plate and serve at once, or the omelette cools and skins over.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled during the First World War, its recipes gathered from Belgian refugees living in Britain and sold to raise money for relief work. That accounts for the tone of these instructions - they are transcribed from cooks describing dishes from memory rather than written out as formal receipts, which is why quantities are absent and the writer takes for granted that you already know how to make bechamel. Asparagus is a point of national pride in Belgium: the pale forced spears of the Mechelen region, grown under mounded earth, were a celebrated crop by the nineteenth century, and asperges à la flamande - asparagus with butter, chopped hard egg and parsley - remains the country's signature treatment. An omelette that pairs the tips with egg and a spoonful of sauce belongs to the same instinct, and would have been a thrifty way to use the tender ends after the tougher lower stalks had gone to soup.