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Bacon Omelet
Take the requisite amount of finely-minced lean bacon, and place in a fryingpan with a little butter or lard, and fry until done. Have ready a sufficient number of eggs well-beaten with salt and pepper, and stir into the bacon. When cooked, take out and serve on a dish.
Oscar gives quantities as "the requisite amount" and "a sufficient number," which assumes a cook who already knows the proportions. Here is what those come to.
- QuantitiesFor a two-egg omelet, about 1 oz (two thin rashers) of minced bacon is right; three eggs and 1.5 oz for a fuller pan. More bacon than that and the eggs cannot hold it together.
- Butter or lard is optional nowOscar adds a little butter or lard to the minced bacon. With modern bacon you can start it in a dry pan over medium heat and add fat only if it looks like sticking.
- Render, then cool the pan slightlyBacon needs a hotter pan than eggs do. Once it is crisp, pull the pan off the heat for thirty seconds before the eggs go in, or the outside sets and browns before the centre moves.
- The hinge: stop while it is still soft"When cooked" here means barely set. Stir gently for the first thirty seconds, then let it sit until the top is still glossy and slightly loose; residual heat finishes it on the plate. Cooked until dry it turns rubbery and weeps.
- Pan sizeAn 8-inch nonstick or well-seasoned pan for two or three eggs. A wide pan spreads the mixture too thin and you get a bacon pancake rather than an omelet.
- YieldAs written, one generous portion or two modest ones. Omelets do not scale in a single pan; make them one at a time.
This is a service recipe rather than a showpiece — the kind of entry Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book includes because a hotel kitchen needed the formula, not the flourish. The terse "requisite amount" phrasing is arguably a fair sample of how many professional cookbooks of the era were written: they seem to have served as aides-mémoire for trained staff, and precise weights often appear only where a mistake would be expensive. The instruction to stir the eggs into the bacon rather than fold the bacon into a finished omelet marks it as the plainer, sturdier version of the two. Oscar himself was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, not its chef, which is part of why the book reads as a compiled house reference.