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Sausage Omelet
Skin three raw sausages, put them into a saucepan with one-fourth ounce of butter; set it on a hot fire for five minutes, and stir well until they are cooked. Make a plain omelet with a dozen eggs, fold over the side opposite the handle of the pan, lay the sausages in the center, fold the other side over, and serve with one-fourth pint of hot Madeira sauce poured round the omelet.
A hotel breakfast omelet scaled for a chafing dish or a large service pan. The two things to settle before you start are the pan size and the sausage, which has to be genuinely cooked before it goes inside.
- Skinned sausagesSlitting the casings and pushing the meat out gives you loose forcemeat, not links. Break it up as it fries so it cooks through in the five minutes given; a whole skinned sausage will still be raw in the middle at that time. Cook to 160F.
- One-fourth ounce of butterAbout 1 1/2 teaspoons. It is there to keep the sausage from catching, not to fry it — the meat renders its own fat almost immediately.
- "A hot fire"Medium-high on a modern burner. Hotter than that and the exterior of the crumbled sausage browns hard while the centre lags.
- A dozen eggs in one panThat is a restaurant omelet. In a domestic 10-inch pan it will not set evenly; either use a 14-inch pan or, more practically, make two omelets of six eggs each and divide the sausage between them.
- The fold"Fold over the side opposite the handle" is the classic French roll — tilt the pan away from you, fold the far third in, add the filling, then flip the near third over it and turn the whole thing onto the plate. The omelet should still be slightly loose in the centre when you fold; carry-over heat finishes it.
- One-fourth pint of Madeira sauceHalf a cup. Oscar's kitchen meant a brown sauce — demi-glace reduced with Madeira and mounted with butter — not sweet fortified wine on its own. Reduced veal or beef stock with a splash of Madeira gets you close.
- YieldTwelve eggs and three sausages serve six as a breakfast dish, four if it is the whole meal.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, and his 1896 cook book is essentially the house repertoire written down: French technique applied to what American hotel guests actually ordered. A sausage omelet sauced with Madeira sits exactly on that line — the filling is a plain breakfast meat, the sauce is a classical brown reduction from the same stockpot that supplied the dinner service. Madeira had been a staple of American cellars since the colonial trade with the island, and by the late nineteenth century sauce madère was standard in professional kitchens for eggs, ham and tongue. The dozen-egg quantity is a reminder that these recipes were transcribed from a working brigade cooking for a table, not for two.