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Jelly Omelet
Put one teaspoonful of butter into a fryingpan and place it over the fire. Beat the yolks of three eggs together with one teaspoonful of sugar and whisk the whites also to a stiff froth. When the butter is melted, mix the whites and yolks gently together, and put them into the pan; as fast as the omelet cooks, lift the cooked part with a fork and throw it on one side of the pan, letting the uncooked part down upon the hot pan. When the omelet is cooked to the desired degree, place one tablespoonful of jelly in the middle, fold the omelet together and turn it out on a hot dish; sprinkle over powdered sugar, and serve.
A sweet soufflé-style omelet of the sort served at the Waldorf for breakfast or as a light supper dish. The whole thing takes under five minutes, and the only real skill is not overcooking it.
- The hinge: fold the whites in, do not stirThe lift in this omelet comes entirely from air beaten into the whites. Fold them into the sweetened yolks with a few strokes of a spatula, keep some streaks, and get the mixture into the pan at once. Beating them together, as "mix gently" might tempt you to do, gives you a flat sweet scramble.
- Pan and heatAn 8-inch nonstick or well-seasoned skillet over medium heat. One teaspoon of butter is meagre for anything larger; use a tablespoon if your pan is 10 inches, and swirl it up the sides.
- Cooked to the desired degreeTwo to three minutes is the whole cooking time. Pull it while the centre is still moist and glossy; residual heat sets it on the plate, and a fully dry sweet omelet turns leathery.
- The fork-and-lift methodOscar is describing the old practice of dragging set curd aside so raw egg runs onto the hot metal. With a foamy mixture it is gentler to lift the edges once or twice, then leave it alone so the base browns lightly and the top puffs.
- The jellyPeriod "jelly" means a firm, clear fruit jelly — currant, quince, apple. Warm the tablespoon slightly so it spreads instead of tearing the omelet, and keep it to the middle third so it does not run out at the fold.
- Powdered sugarConfectioners' sugar. If you want the caramelized streaks of the classic version, dust it and pass a hot skewer or run it under a broiler for a few seconds.
- YieldThree eggs makes one generous portion, or a modest one split between two. It does not scale well past four or five eggs in a single pan; cook in batches.
Sweet omelets were common hotel and restaurant fare in the nineteenth century, appearing on menus alongside their savoury cousins — French cookery of the period distinguished the omelette au naturel from the omelette soufflée and its jam-filled relatives, and American hotel kitchens borrowed the vocabulary. Separating the eggs and whipping the whites, as here, puts this closer to a soufflé omelet than to the plain rolled kind, a technique generally traced to French practice. Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, and his 1896 book collects the sort of quick à la carte dish a hotel cook had to turn out to order in minutes: three eggs, a spoonful of jelly, no waiting.