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Plain French Omelet
6 eggs
2 tablespoons butter
Salt and pepper
Beat the eggs just enough to mix the whites and yolks, and add salt and pepper. Heat butter in an omelet-pan, pour a little of it into the beaten eggs and allow the remainder to get hot. Turn the eggs into the pan and as the mixture cooks on the bottom and sides, prick it with a fork so that the egg on top will penetrate the cooked surface, and run under the sides. The work must be done quickly and carefully so that the eggs are not all stirred up like scrambled eggs. While the eggs are still soft, but slightly thickened, fold over, let stand a few minutes to brown, and turn on to a hot dish.
A straightforward folded omelet, and the method still works as written. The only real adjustments are pan choice and a modern sense of how long eggs should stay on the heat.
- The hinge: keep it moving, then stopThe pricking-and-tilting step is what separates an omelet from scrambled eggs. Work fast over medium-high heat, and pull the pan the moment the surface is still glossy and slightly loose; residual heat finishes it during the fold.
- Pan sizeAn "omelet-pan" here is a shallow, sloping-sided skillet, and six eggs want one 10 to 12 inches across. Crowded into an 8-inch pan the egg sets too thick to fold cleanly.
- Butter quantityTwo tablespoons for six eggs is generous by modern habit but correct for the technique — the fat in the eggs and the film in the pan are both doing work. A well-seasoned or nonstick pan will let you cut it to one tablespoon.
- "Let stand a few minutes to brown"Read this as under a minute on the heat, not several minutes off it. Contemporary French practice tends to favor a pale, unbrowned omelet; a light gold underside is as far as many modern cooks take it.
- Beating"Just enough to mix" is literal: stop as soon as the whites and yolks are no longer distinct. Overbeaten eggs incorporate air, puff, and then collapse into something drier.
- YieldSix eggs will serve two or three as a main course, or four at breakfast alongside other dishes. Two smaller three-egg omelets cooked in succession are easier to handle than one large one.
The plain French omelet earned its adjective by contrast: American and English cookbooks of the period also gave a puffed or "souffléd" omelet, in which the whites were beaten separately and the whole thing finished in the oven. The insistence here on beating the eggs "just enough to mix" is the whole distinction, and the reason the recipe pauses to warn against scrambling. Butterick, better known for dress patterns, published household compendiums like this one for a middle-class readership assembling a working repertoire, and a quick egg dish made in a single pan was exactly the sort of thing such books existed to teach. The technique itself is old and well established in French domestic cooking; the folded, barely-set omelet is often said to have become, by the mid-nineteenth century, the standard against which others were measured.