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Crab Omelet
Take six ounces of boiled crab-meat and cut it into small pieces; place them in a sautepan together with one wineglassful of white wine and about one-fourth of an ounce of butter. Dampen with one teacupful of strong hot bechamel sauce and let these cook together for five minutes. Make an omelet with one dozen eggs, and with the use of a skimmer, place the stewed crab in the middle, fold over the side opposite the handle, pour in the garnishing, fold up the other side, turn it all onto a hot dish, lay the sauce round it, and serve.
A hotel omelet scaled for a table of guests, written for a cook who already knows how to make bechamel and how to roll an omelet out of the pan. Two things need translating: the volumes, and the fact that twelve eggs is not one omelet in a modern skillet.
- Wineglassful and teacupfulBy the usual nineteenth-century convention a wineglassful is about 2 fl oz, so a scant quarter cup of dry white wine. A teacupful is less fixed, reckoned anywhere from about 4 to 6 fl oz; taking the larger figure gives roughly three-quarters of a cup of bechamel.
- Twelve eggs is not one panA dozen eggs is far more than a domestic skillet will hold and fold cleanly. Divide into three omelets of four eggs each in a 9- or 10-inch nonstick or well-seasoned pan, and split the filling three ways.
- Bechamel firstThe sauce is doing all the work and there is no recipe for it here. Make about 1 1/2 cups of a medium bechamel (2 tbsp butter, 2 tbsp flour, 1 1/2 cups hot milk, salt, a scrape of nutmeg) before you touch the eggs: three-quarters of a cup goes into the crab, the rest is spooned around the finished omelet.
- The crabSix ounces of picked crab meat, lump or claw, already cooked. Pasteurised refrigerated crab is fine; drain it well, since excess liquid will thin the sauce and split the omelet.
- Five minutes is the limitCooked crab has nothing left to gain from heat and everything to lose. Reduce the wine and butter first, then stir in the bechamel and warm it through only until the filling is thick enough to sit on a spoon.
- "Fold over the side opposite the handle"This is the classic French roll, done in the pan: eggs stirred over moderate heat until barely set and still glossy on top, filling laid down the centre, the far edge folded in, then the near edge, then inverted onto the plate seam-side down. Take it off the heat while the surface still looks underdone.
- "Pour in the garnishing"The instruction is genuinely elliptical, and the text never says what the garnishing is. The likeliest reading is a little extra sauce, or reserved pieces of crab, added between the two folds; hold back a couple of spoonfuls of the filling for the purpose rather than guessing at something new.
- Equipment noteA skimmer here is a flat slotted spoon, used to lift the crab out of its sauce so the filling goes in thick rather than soupy. A slotted spoon does the same job.
- YieldThe full dozen eggs and six ounces of crab serve six as a lunch course, or four generously.
Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896, is generally taken to reflect the cooking associated with the Waldorf at a moment when American hotel cooking was consciously French in method and American in materials, though Oscar himself was maitre d'hotel rather than chef. The omelette aux fines herbes and its endless variations were standard restaurant grammar; what marks this one is the filling, since Atlantic blue crab was cheap, abundant and shipped into New York in quantity by the 1890s. The construction is textbook French: a cooked garnish bound with bechamel, folded into a soft omelet, with more of the same sauce poured around the dish. Note also the scale. Twelve eggs to a single omelet tells you this was written down by a man who cooked for tables, not for households, and the recipes in the Waldorf sections often need dividing before they fit a domestic pan.