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Lobster Omelet
Take six ounces of lobster-meat and cut it into small pieces; place them in a stewpan with one wineglassful of white wine and a quarter of an ounce of butter, moisten with a fourth of a pint of strong, hot bechamel sauce, and let cook for five minutes. Make an omelet with twelve eggs, and with a skimmer place the stewed lobster in the middle of the fold over the side opposite the handle, lay in more garnishing, fold the other side up, turn it onto a hot dish, pour the sauce around, and serve.
A Waldorf service omelet, written for a cook who already knows how to roll eggs in a steel pan. The measurements are late-Victorian restaurant shorthand.
- The unitsA wineglassful is about 2 fl oz (a scant quarter cup). A quarter of a pint of bechamel is 4 fl oz in US measure, 5 fl oz if you read it as an imperial pint. A quarter ounce of butter is roughly half a tablespoon.
- The lobster is already cookedThe recipe assumes boiled lobster picked from the shell. The five minutes in wine and bechamel reads as heating the meat through and marrying the flavors rather than cooking it from raw.
- Reduce the wine firstTwo ounces of white wine poured straight into four ounces of bechamel will thin it to a pouring consistency. Let the wine cook down by half with the butter before the sauce goes in, or the filling will run out of the omelet.
- "More garnishing"The sentence is garbled in the original; a word appears to be missing after "in the middle of." The sense is: put part of the lobster in the middle, fold over the side opposite the handle, lay in the rest of the garnish, then fold the other side up -- the second helping goes inside the omelet, not on top of it.
- Sauce around, not overThe recipe directs the sauce to be poured around the omelet rather than over it. If you want a cleaner-looking sauce, hold back a few spoonfuls of plain bechamel for the purpose.
- Pan size and yieldTwelve eggs is a banquet omelet and needs a 12- to 14-inch pan and real wrist strength to roll. For home cooking, split it into two six-egg omelets in a 10-inch pan with half the filling each. The recipe gives no yield; twelve eggs would serve roughly six. The fold-and-turn method means the whole thing must be finished in one motion, so have the dish hot and waiting.
- BechamelA modern equivalent: butter and flour cooked out without color, whisked with hot milk and simmered with a bay leaf and an onion clove, then strained. The recipe specifies a strong bechamel, so use enough roux that it coats a spoon heavily -- 1 tbsp each butter and flour to 1 cup milk gives a thin one.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms at the Waldorf from 1893, and this omelet belongs to the hotel's long list of luxury dishes built on the same premise as Lobster Newburg — cooked lobster meat, a fortified cream sauce, and a swift finish at service. Lobster was not the extravagance in 1896 that it is now; it was abundant on the Atlantic coast, though it is often said, perhaps too simply, to have only recently shed a reputation as cheap food, and what made a dish like this expensive was the twelve eggs, the butter and the labor of a cook who could roll a large omelet without breaking it. The instruction to fold "the side opposite the handle" first is a small window on technique: the French rolled omelet is made by tipping the pan away from you, folding the far edge over the filling, then rolling the whole out onto the plate seam-down, and Oscar wrote it for cooks who had been taught the motion rather than the reason.