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Plain Omelets
Beat six eggs well in a basin and season with pepper and salt and a little water. Melt a large piece of butter in a fryingpan, pour the beaten eggs in and stand it at the side but not on the fire, turning it often. When the edges are done gather them together and roll over and over, and serve them very hot.
A French-style rolled omelet written for a coal range, where heat came from proximity rather than a dial. The whole method turns on cooking it gently and stopping early.
- "At the side but not on the fire"On a coal or wood range, the cooler edge of the top plate ran well below the firebox. On a gas or electric burner that means medium-low, and the pan lifted off the heat entirely for a few seconds whenever the eggs begin to set too fast.
- YieldSix eggs is one large omelet for two, or two smaller omelets of three eggs each. Three-egg portions cooked one at a time give a better roll and a shorter cooking time.
- "A large piece of butter"Read this as roughly 1 to 2 tablespoons for a six-egg omelet. Let it foam and subside but not brown; browned butter colours the omelet.
- The waterA tablespoon for six eggs is about as much as "a little" will bear. It turns to steam and lightens the set slightly. Milk or cream, which appears in many later American recipes, makes a softer but wetter omelet.
- Beating"Beat well" here means until the whites and yolks are uniform, perhaps thirty seconds with a fork, not until frothy. Over-aerated eggs souffle and then collapse.
- The panAn 8- to 10-inch pan with sloping sides, well seasoned or nonstick. Straight-sided pans make the rolling step much harder.
- DonenessRoll while the surface is still visibly moist. Carryover heat finishes it on the plate; an omelet that looks done in the pan is dry by the time it reaches the table.
- TimingThe whole operation takes two to four minutes over gentle heat. "Turning it often" most likely means stirring and shaking the setting curds rather than flipping the omelet.
Oscar Tschirky came to the Waldorf as maitre d'hotel in 1893 and put his name to The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, a volume of some nine hundred pages that set down the working repertoire of a large American hotel kitchen at the moment it was most thoroughly French in its methods. The plain rolled omelet is the base of that repertoire: the book follows it with a long run of variations, and the technique here, gentle heat and a roll rather than a fold, is the one codified in French professional practice through the nineteenth century. The instruction to stand the pan "at the side but not on the fire" is a small fossil of the coal range, where a cook regulated heat by moving the pan across the top plate rather than by adjusting the fire.