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Omelet of Green Peas
Break twelve eggs into a bowl, adding one-half pint of boiled green peas, a little salt and pepper, and beat well for four minutes, then make it into an omelet.
Oscar assumes the reader already knows how to make an omelet, so the whole method is compressed into five words at the end. The useful work here is scale, moisture and heat.
- Half a pint of peasThat is one cup, measured after boiling. Fresh shelled peas boiled 3-5 minutes, or thawed frozen peas, both work; drain them thoroughly and pat dry or the omelet will weep.
- Twelve eggs is a batch, not an omeletA single twelve-egg omelet is unmanageable in a domestic pan. Divide into three or four portions of three or four eggs each, with a proportionate share of peas, and cook them one at a time in an 8- to 10-inch pan. The full quantity serves four to six.
- Four minutes of beating is too longThirty seconds with a fork, just until the yolks and whites are streak-free, gives a more tender curd; overbeaten eggs tend to cook up tough and thin.
- "Make it into an omelet"French method: butter a hot pan over medium-high heat, pour in the eggs, and stir with the flat of a fork while shaking the pan until the mass is softly set but still glossy, then fold or roll it out onto the plate. Total time is under two minutes per omelet.
- Warm the peas firstCold peas straight from the refrigerator chill the eggs and slow the set, which is how omelets end up browned. Toss them in the buttered pan for a moment before adding the eggs, or stir them in warm.
- Seasoning"A little salt and pepper" for twelve eggs means roughly a teaspoon of salt in total. Salt the eggs just before cooking rather than long in advance.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, and this entry has the character of a service note rather than a domestic recipe: a working quantity of eggs, one filling, and the assumption that the cook reading it has made a thousand omelets already. Green-pea omelets belong to the French repertoire that dominated American hotel cooking around 1900, and omelets appear in many variations -- fine herbs, cheese, ham, kidneys -- in books of this kind. Peas were also a marker of season and expense before freezing was common, which may be part of why they turn up in luxury hotel menus of the era; a plain egg dish became a spring dish simply by folding them in.