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American Omelet
Pour one pint of veloute sauce into a sauceboat, place it on a moderate fire, add a piece of lobster butter about the size of an egg, together with twenty-four cooked and skinned shrimps, and season with salt and a little pepper. Cook for three minutes, stirring slightly; then add half an empty peeled green pepper, finely hashed, cook for ten minutes longer, then let it rest on the corner of the stove. Make an omelet with twelve eggs, fold up the side nearest the handle of the pan, pour half of the preparation in the center, fold the other side over, turn the omelet onto a hot dish, garnish both sides with the rest of the shrimps, pouring the remainder of the sauce round the dish, and serve it while it is very hot.
A hotel-kitchen omelet: a shrimp velout bound with lobster butter, folded into a twelve-egg omelet. The sauce is the work; the omelet itself takes under two minutes.
- Sauceboat means saucepan"Pour one pint of veloute sauce into a sauceboat, place it on a moderate fire" y the vessel here is a small saucepan, not the serving jug. Moderate fire is a medium-low burner enough to hold a simmer without breaking the sauce.
- VelouteA pint (2 cups) of white stock veal or chicken thickened with a pale roux and simmered until it coats a spoon. Fish veloute or a light shellfish sauce suits the filling better than veal if you have the trimmings.
- Lobster butterNot a modern retail item. It is made by pounding cooked lobster shells and coral with an equal weight of soft butter, warming gently, then straining and chilling. "About the size of an egg" is roughly 2 ounces. Without it the sauce loses most of its character; do not substitute plain butter and call it done.
- "Half an empty peeled green pepper"Empty means seeded and cored; peeled presumably means the skin taken off, whether pared or blistered over a flame. Finely hashed, half a large bell pepper is roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup. The ten minutes is to soften the pepper rather than to reduce the sauce, so keep the heat low.
- Shrimp are already cookedThe twenty-four shrimps go in cooked and shelled and only need to heat through in the three minutes given. If you are poaching them yourself, two to three minutes in barely simmering court-bouillon is the whole job longer and they tighten into rubber.
- Divide the shrimp before you startThe recipe puts all twenty-four in the sauce, then asks you to garnish with "the rest of the shrimps." Set aside eight or ten whole ones for the plate and add them to the sauce only at the end, off the heat.
- "Rest on the corner of the stove"A coal range had a cool edge where a pan sat warm without cooking. The equivalent is the lowest burner setting or a pan of hot water; if the sauce sits over direct heat it will thicken and split.
- Twelve eggs in one panThat is a 12- to 14-inch pan and a practiced wrist. Two six-egg omelets in a 10-inch pan, each filled with half the sauce, give the same result with far less risk of a broken fold. Serves six as a lunch dish.
Oscar Tschirky is generally said to have served as maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, and later the Waldorf-Astoria, from 1893 onward; the book collects the working repertoire of a kitchen staffed by French-trained cooks feeding New Yorkers. The naming is a period habit rather than a claim of origin hotel menus labeled omelets by their garnish, so an omelet with shrimp, sweet pepper and shellfish butter became "American" much as one with tomato became Portugaise. Neither the technique nor the sauce is American: velout lobster butter and the loose-centered folded omelet are all straight out of the classical French kitchen of the 1880s and 1890s. What is local is the pairing of shrimp with green bell pepper, and the sheer scale of a twelve-egg omelet brought whole to the table.