Spanish Omelet
Mix and cook a French Omelet. Serve with Tomato Sauce in the centre and around omelet.
Tomato Sauce. Cook two tablespoons of butter with one tablespoon of finely chopped onion, until yellow. Add one and three-fourths cups tomatoes, and cook until moisture has nearly evaporated. Add one tablespoon sliced mushrooms, one tablespoon capers, one-fourth teaspoon salt, and a few grains cayenne. This is improved by a small piece of red or green pepper, finely chopped, cooked with butter and onion.
A French omelet with a thick tomato-caper sauce, the sauce doing all the work. The whole thing takes about twenty minutes once the eggs are ready.
- Reduce the sauce firstThe instruction that matters is "cook until moisture has nearly evaporated." A watery sauce will slump off the omelet and make it weep. The recipe gives no time; allow perhaps 10-15 minutes over medium heat, until the tomato holds its shape on the spoon.
- "One and three-fourths cups tomatoes"Canned tomatoes, or the same volume of peeled fresh tomatoes in season. A 14-15 oz can, with its packing liquid, comes to roughly this volume; chop or crush the pieces and cook the sauce down as directed.
- Sliced mushroomsOne tablespoon is a token amount by modern taste, functioning as a seasoning rather than a vegetable; two or three sliced cremini, sauteed with the onion, sit better with current expectations.
- CapersRinse brined capers before adding them, or the sauce can turn sharply salty as it reduces. Salt-packed capers need a longer soak.
- "A few grains cayenne"A pinch or less. The optional red or green pepper is most likely a sweet pepper rather than a chile, though the recipe does not specify.
- The French omelet it refers toFollow the book's own French omelet recipe, which is not reprinted here. Keep the heat brisk and the eggs barely set; the sauce should be finished and waiting.
- YieldThe sauce reduces to roughly three-quarters of a cup, enough for more than one omelet.
The "Spanish omelet" of American cookbooks has little to do with the Spanish tortilla, which is a thick potato-and-egg cake served in wedges. What appeared on American hotel and restaurant menus from the later nineteenth century onward was a folded French omelet masked in a tomato sauce with onion, sweet pepper and often olives or capers -- "Spanish" standing in loosely for tomato and pepper, as it does in "Spanish rice" and "Spanish sauce." The treatment here is characteristic of the Boston Cooking-School method: the omelet is taught once, as a technique, and the variations are handled entirely through the sauce, so the pupil learns one skill and can vary the dish. Capers and bottled mushrooms were shelf-stable imports that let a cook add depth to a tomato sauce in winter without fresh produce.