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Egg and Truffle Omelets
Cut into thin slices a small quantity of truffles, put them into a stewpan with little brown sauce, and boil very gently. Prepare a sufficient quantity of plain egg omelets, spread on the truffles, and fold them up. Spread a folded napkin over a hot dish, arrange the omelets on it, and garnish with parsley.
A restaurant assembly note rather than a full recipe: Oscar assumes you already know how to turn out a plain French omelet and have a pot of brown sauce on the stove. The whole dish stands or falls on the filling being thick enough not to soak the eggs.
- Brown sauceThis is espagnole or a reduced demi-glace, not gravy from a jar. Whatever you use, it should coat a spoon; a thin sauce will run out of the fold and flood the plate.
- "Boil very gently"The point is to draw the truffle flavour into the sauce over low heat rather than to cook the slices hard. A few minutes at a bare simmer is enough. The recipe gives no time and says nothing about covering the pan.
- QuantityThe original gives none. For a two- or three-egg omelet, figure roughly a tablespoon of sliced truffle and two tablespoons of sauce; the filling should be a spoonful, not a ladleful.
- Which truffleA hotel kitchen of this period would most likely have been working with preserved (tinned) black truffle. Tinned or jarred truffle takes gentle heat well; fresh white truffle does not and is better shaved raw over the finished omelet.
- Truffle oil is not a substituteMost of it is synthetic 2,4-dithiapentane and turns harsh when heated in sauce. If truffle is out of reach, a good mushroom duxelles in the same brown sauce makes an honest dish under a different name.
- The omelet itselfFrench style: eggs beaten just to combine, hot butter, constant movement for under a minute, still slightly loose in the centre when you fill and roll it. Residual heat finishes it on the way to the table.
- The folded napkinA period service convention. It absorbs butter and keeps the omelets from sliding on the platter; it is not doing anything to the cooking and can be skipped.
- Yield and timingOne omelet per person, made to order. Omelets do not hold well and are best sent out as they are finished, though the recipe itself has several arranged together on a single napkin-lined dish.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf dining rooms at the height of the American vogue for French service, and this entry reads exactly like a line cook's aide-mémoire: the technique is assumed, only the garnish and the plating are spelled out. The omelette aux truffes was a standard of the classical repertoire, appearing in French kitchen manuals through the nineteenth century, and it survived in hotel breakfast and supper service because it was fast and expensive-looking. The tinned Périgord truffle, widely traded by the 1890s, is what made it possible to put the dish on a New York menu year-round. The folded napkin under the omelets is a small period tell — hotel dining rooms of the era plated a great deal on napkins, which helped steady the food.