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Parmesan Cheese Omelet
Break two eggs into a basin and dust over with a very little pepper and cayenne. Put one ounce of butter into a pan rubbed over with garlic. When it is boiling, pour in the eggs and hold the pan over the fire until the omelet is set; then put a tablespoonful of grated Parmesan cheese on one-half of it, cover with the other half, cook for a minute longer, and serve immediately.
A two-egg omelet of the plainest kind, and it lives or dies on heat control. The whole thing takes about three minutes at the stove, so have the cheese grated before the butter goes in.
- The hinge: moderate heat, not high"Hold the pan over the fire until the omelet is set" assumes a coal range where you could lift the pan away from the heat at will. On a gas or induction burner use medium, and pull the pan off the flame for a few seconds whenever the edges start to color. A French-style omelet like this should stay pale gold, never brown and never crisp.
- An ounce of butterThat is two tablespoons for two eggs, generous by modern habit. Use an 8-inch nonstick or well-seasoned pan; in anything larger the two eggs spread too thin to fold.
- No salt, and that is deliberateNo salt is listed -- only pepper and cayenne. The tablespoon of Parmesan brings salt of its own, so taste before adding any, and if you do, add it to the eggs rather than the finished omelet.
- The garlic rubRubbing the pan with a cut clove gives a trace of aroma rather than garlic flavor. Halve a clove, wipe the inside of the cold pan, discard it, then add the butter. Leaving the garlic in the hot butter will scorch it.
- ParmesanGrate it from a block of Parmigiano-Reggiano or a domestic hard grating cheese; pre-grated shaker cheese usually carries an anti-caking agent such as cellulose or starch and melts poorly. Fine grating matters, since it has only a minute of residual heat to soften in.
- "Cook for a minute longer"Once folded, the minute is to warm the cheese through, not to cook the eggs further. The center should still be slightly loose when it reaches the plate, since it keeps setting on the way there.
- YieldOne serving, and it does not scale in the pan. For two people, make two omelets in succession rather than doubling the eggs.
The omelette au parmesan was a standard of the French repertoire that governed American hotel cooking of the period, a folded omelette filled rather than beaten with its filling, and it belongs to the light savory dishes a hotel kitchen could produce in minutes for supper or a late order. The recipe is written in the terse hand of a professional who expected the reader to have stood at a range.