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Rum Omelet
Put half a dozen eggs and a small quantity of milk into a basin, add one teaspoonful of finely-powdered loaf sugar and beat well, but do not make the omelet too light. Turn the mixture into a fryingpan with a small lump of butter and fry until done, rolling the omelet into shape as quickly as it begins to get stiff. Turn it out onto a dish, dredge over a little sugar, pour round one teacupful of rum, ignite it, and serve at once.
A sweet omelet finished at the table, in the plain style of the Waldorf's late-nineteenth-century supper card. Nothing here is difficult, but the proportions and the finish both need translating.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a hard cone, broken up and pounded as needed. "Finely-powdered loaf sugar" is what we would call caster or superfine sugar; ordinary granulated pounded briefly in a mortar or pulsed in a grinder is the same thing.
- The milk"A small quantity" for six eggs is probably in the region of a couple of tablespoons — enough to loosen the eggs, not enough to make them weep in the pan. The recipe does not specify, and too much milk will make the omelet harder to roll cleanly.
- Do not over-beatThe instruction not to make it too light is the hinge. This is a rolled French omelet, not a soufflé omelet: beat only until the yolks and whites are combined and streak-free. Air makes it puff, then collapse and split as you roll it.
- Pan and heatSix eggs will want a large pan, something in the 10- to 11-inch range, over a fairly brisk heat, and "a small lump of butter" is perhaps a tablespoon; the recipe specifies neither. Work fast — the eggs should still be slightly moist inside when you roll them.
- A teacupful of rumA teacupful in period recipes is usually reckoned at somewhere between 4 and 6 fluid ounces, which is a great deal of spirit for one omelet. Half that, warmed in a small pan until just hot to the finger, lights more readily; cold rum poured straight from the bottle can refuse to catch.
- Flaming safelyIgnite away from the extractor hood and any overhead cloth, never pour from the bottle toward a lit dish, and use a long match rather than leaning over the plate.
- YieldSix eggs serve three as a dessert or two as a supper dish. Divide at the table before the flame dies; a rum omelet does not reheat.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and put his name to this collection in 1896, at a period when the sweet omelet is often said to have been a fixture of the late-supper card at good hotels. Omelette au rhum and its cousins (au kirsch, with jam, with candied fruit) came straight out of the French professional repertoire that staffed New York's grand hotels, where flaming a dish at the table was as much service as cookery. One small period detail is the loaf sugar: a cook who wrote "finely-powdered loaf sugar" expected a mortar to be on hand.