Home › The Belgian Kitchen › Mushroom Omelette
Mushroom Omelette
Toss the sliced mushrooms in butter, adding, if you wish, a little mushroom ketchup. Break the eggs in a pan and beat them lightly together, and cook for three minutes over a good fire. Slip the omelette on a hot dish, spread with butter.
A sketch rather than a recipe: no quantities, no pan size, no seasoning. The proportions are left to the cook, which was normal in a book of this kind.
- Quantities are absentNothing is specified. For a single omelette work on three eggs and about 3 oz (85 g) sliced mushrooms, with a good tablespoon of butter for each stage.
- "A good fire"On a range this meant a hot, direct heat rather than a slow one. Medium-high on a gas burner, in a pan that is fully heated before the eggs go in.
- Three minutes is the outer limitAn omelette of this size is set in well under three minutes in a hot pan. Take it out while the centre is still glossy; it carries on cooking on the hot dish.
- Mushroom ketchupNot a tomato product but a thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, still sold in Britain and easily replaced by a few drops of soy sauce or Worcestershire. Add it after the mushrooms have released and reabsorbed their liquid, or the pan will steam.
- Dry the mushrooms firstThe mushrooms should be tossed until their water has cooked off and they begin to colour. Wet mushrooms folded into eggs make a slack, weeping omelette.
- SeasoningNone is mentioned. Salt and pepper the eggs before they go in the pan, sparingly if you have used mushroom ketchup.
- "Spread with butter"A knob of butter rubbed over the hot surface, so it melts to a gloss. It is finishing, not a cooking step.
- YieldNot stated. On the three-egg basis suggested above, one omelette, serving one, or two at a light lunch with bread. Omelettes do not scale up in a single pan; make them one at a time.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled during the First World War from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees in Britain, and sold in aid of relief for their countrymen. That origin may account for the brevity here: many of these dishes were set down from memory rather than measured out by a professional. Mushroom ketchup was an English store-cupboard bottling of long standing rather than a Belgian one, which suggests the collection was framed for a British kitchen. The dish itself belongs to the broad French and Belgian repertoire of the omelette aux champignons.