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Chicken's Liver Omelet
After partially boiling the liver, cut it into small pieces, put them in a fryingpan with butter, two or three button mushrooms, a shallot and a tablespoonful of parsley, all finely-minced; season to taste with salt and pepper and fry them for ten minutes. Turn them into a basin, and when cold, beat in three eggs. Put a lump of butter in an omelet-pan, and when melted, put in the omelet and fry it. Serve it on a folded napkin or a fancy dish-paper on a hot dish, and garnish with fried parsley.
A one-pan supper omelet from Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf kitchen, written for cooks who already knew how to handle an omelet pan. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- The hinge: cool the filling firstThe instruction to turn the liver mixture into a basin and let it go cold before beating in the eggs is the whole technique. Hot filling starts to scramble the eggs on contact and you lose the omelet's structure.
- How much liverNo quantity is given. Three eggs makes a roughly two-person omelet, and one or two chicken livers — an ounce or two — looks like the right proportion. Much more and the filling will not hold together in the egg.
- "Partially boiling" and the ten-minute fryBlanching the liver firms it enough to dice cleanly. But blanched liver plus ten minutes in butter will be grey and grainy; a shorter time in the pan is enough to cook the mushroom and shallot through and finish the liver, which should still be cooked right through.
- Button mushroomsCultivated mushrooms of this period were generally small immature agarics, likely closer in colour to what is now sold as a cremini button than to the large white caps. Two or three probably means something under an ounce, finely minced so they melt into the filling.
- Shallot, not onionOne small shallot. If you substitute onion the result is not the same, as onion is sweeter and wetter.
- The omelet panAn 8-inch pan for three eggs. The recipe says "fry it" and leaves the rest unsaid: medium heat, agitate until the egg is mostly set, then fold and turn out. Oscar assumed you knew.
- Fried parsleyDry sprigs dropped into hot fat for a few seconds until crisp and still green. They spit — the parsley must be thoroughly dry going in.
- The napkinServing on a folded napkin was a period restaurant convention for absorbing fat and steam. A warmed plate does the same job without the laundry.
Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf, and later the Waldorf-Astoria, from 1893, and the 1896 Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf is a broad compilation of French-influenced cookery set down for a general readership. Liver omelets belong to the thrifty end of that tradition: the giblets that came with every dressed bird were too good to waste, and a minced garniture of liver, mushroom and shallot bound in egg turned a few ounces of offal into a course. Recipes of this shape appear across nineteenth-century French cookery as omelette aux foies de volaille, and the folded napkin and fried parsley in the last line are pure hotel service of the 1890s — presentation conventions that outlived the dish itself in American homes.