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Ham Omelet
Scatter over the center of the omelet a few spoonfuls of finely chopped ham. Cheese, parsley and chicken are used in the same way.
This is a variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes the plain French omelet given earlier in the egg chapter, and tells you only what to add and when. The rest has to be supplied from practice.
- The base omeletThis assumes the plain French omelet given earlier in the egg chapter: eggs beaten with a little liquid and salt, cooked in butter in a small pan over brisk heat. In modern terms three eggs in a small pan will feed one, four in a larger pan two.
- When to add the fillingThe hinge is timing. Scatter the ham when the eggs are still glossy and barely set on top, just before folding, so it warms through without drying. Added at the start it sinks, weeps and keeps the eggs from setting evenly.
- How much"A few spoonfuls" is roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons of chopped ham for a three-egg omelet. More than that and the omelet will not fold cleanly.
- The ham itselfThis almost certainly means cooked, cured ham, cut fine, rather than raw country ham, which at the time would still have been soaked and boiled first. Any cooked ham works; chop it small enough that no piece tears the egg when folding.
- The other fillingsCheese should be grated and takes the heat well; parsley should be chopped fine and added at the same late stage or it goes drab; cooked chicken wants to be finely diced and warmed first, since a cold filling cools the omelet through.
- Heat and panMedium-high in a well-seasoned or nonstick pan, and the whole thing should take under two minutes. A slow pan gives a rubbery, browned omelet, which is the failure this style of cooking is written against.
The chained variation — one full recipe followed by a line or two showing how to ring changes on it — was a familiar enough device in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks, where readers were expected to have read the preceding page. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, put out its cook book in that same instructional spirit: a household manual for a middle-class cook working without a trained staff. The fillings listed here are telling. Ham, cheese, parsley and cold chicken are all things a careful kitchen would have had on hand as leftovers or larder staples, and the omelet was one of the standard ways to bring them back to the table respectably. The French-style folded omelet had been thoroughly domesticated in American and British cooking by this date, generally traced to the influence of French professional cookery on Anglophone household writing through the nineteenth century.