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Ham Omelet
Mince two ounces of ham fine, taking lean and fat in equal proportions; put the mince into a basin with four eggs, and beat them up well. Put one ounce of butter in an omelet pan, and when it has melted, pour in the mixture. Hold the handle of the pan in one hand, and stir the omelet with a spoon with the other; when it begins to set, cease stirring, shake the pan for a few minutes until the lower side of the omelet is browned, then fold it over with a spoon. Turn the omelet onto a hot dish with a folded napkin, or a fancy-edged dish-paper, garnish with parsley, and serve.
A plain French-style rolled omelet with ham worked through the egg rather than laid in as a filling. Everything hinges on heat control and on stopping while the center is still soft.
- Scale and yieldFour eggs, two ounces of ham and one ounce of butter make one large omelet; the recipe does not say how many it serves. Split between two pans of two eggs each if you want individual servings, dividing the butter between them.
- The ham"Lean and fat in equal proportions" means cooked, cured ham off a bone or a thick slice, not deli-thin sliced ham, which is too lean and too wet. Mince it to the size of rice grains so it disperses rather than tearing the egg as you fold.
- Heat is the hingeMedium heat, no higher. The instruction to stir until it begins to set and then stop is the whole technique: the stirring builds small curds, the resting sets them into a sheet. Too hot a pan browns the outside before the interior has any structure.
- "Until the lower side is browned"This recipe wants color on the underside. Modern practice is to keep it pale gold and to pull the pan while the top still looks glossy and slightly loose, since carryover heat finishes it on the plate.
- The panThe recipe specifies only "an omelet pan"; such pans were commonly iron or steel and, by long-standing kitchen tradition, reserved for eggs. A 9- or 10-inch nonstick or carbon-steel skillet with sloping sides does the same job; the sloping wall is what lets you fold and roll the omelet out.
- SaltNone is called for because the ham supplies it. Taste the ham first, and season the eggs lightly if it is a mild one.
- The napkinA folded napkin or fancy-edged dish-paper under the omelet was a service convention of the period. A warmed plate is enough at home; skip the paper.
Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, and later the Waldorf-Astoria, from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book gathered the hotel's working repertoire into some nine hundred pages. Omelets occupy a long run of consecutive entries in it, each a variation on the same base of eggs and butter with one flavoring worked in, which is exactly how a hotel kitchen thought: a single technique the line could execute at speed, differentiated by whatever was on hand. Ham was among those garnishes. The omelet described here is rolled and stirred rather than puffed and finished in the oven.