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Omelette of Peas
Beat up three eggs, to which add one tablespoonful of grated cheese, pepper, and salt, and mix thoroughly. Butter an omelette pan, and pour in the mixture, keep moving it gently with a fork while you sprinkle in with the other hand some cooked green peas. The omelette will be cooked by the time you have sprinkled in two handfuls. Slip it off on to a very hot dish, fold over, and serve at once.
A three-egg omelette with cheese and peas, cooked fast in a hot pan. The only real difficulty is that the original assumes you know how an omelette pan behaves.
- The hingeHeat matters more than technique here. The pan should be hot enough that the butter foams but does not brown, and the whole thing should be done in well under two minutes. Peas added to a slack pan will weep water and slump the eggs.
- "Two handfuls" of peasRead as roughly 2/3 to 1 cup of already-cooked peas, depending on the hand. They must be cooked and drained before they go in; frozen peas thawed and patted dry work well and are closer to fresh garden peas than tinned.
- Grated cheeseA tablespoon is a seasoning, not a filling. The recipe does not name a cheese; any dry, well-flavoured hard cheese, Gruyere included, does the job. Skip pre-shredded cheese, which carries anti-caking starch.
- The omelette panAn 8-inch pan for three eggs. Anything wider and the omelette sets too thin to fold; anything narrower and the centre stays raw while the base colours.
- "Keep moving it gently with a fork"This is the French method of dragging the setting curd from the edges toward the centre, not scrambling. Stop stirring while the top is still glossy and slightly loose, since it will carry on cooking on the hot dish.
- "A very hot dish"Warm the serving plate in a low oven or under hot water. A cold plate chills the omelette in seconds and is why the instruction is emphasised.
- YieldOne generous serving, or two small ones. It does not scale up in the same pan: cook a second omelette rather than doubling the eggs.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in 1915 from recipes gathered from Belgian refugees who had fled to Britain after the German invasion, and it is often assumed, as with such wartime volumes, to have been sold in aid of relief work. That context shows in a dish like this one: three eggs, a spoonful of cheese and a couple of handfuls of peas is food for a household cooking economically, with no meat and nothing that needs a long fire. Belgium had a strong market-garden tradition, and green peas, petits pois, were a staple summer vegetable eaten young and small. The technique itself is straightforwardly French rather than distinctively Belgian, which is unsurprising in a Francophone kitchen tradition; what this particular recipe does is add the filling while the eggs are still moving, rather than laying it in a band and enclosing it at the end.