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Spanish Omelet
Put a finely-shred onion, one ounce of butter, a chopped green pepper, six minced mushrooms, and one large tomato cut fine, into a stewpan; add one spoonful of tomato sauce, a little salt and pepper, and cook for fifteen minutes. Make a plain omelet with twelve eggs, fold the farther side towards the center, put three-fourths of the stew inside of it, fold the other side over, turn out onto a long dish, pour the rest of the sauce round, and serve.
A hotel-scale omelet: twelve eggs in one pan, filled with a quick sofrito of onion, pepper, mushroom and tomato. Nearly everything here works as written; the difficulty is the size.
- Yield and pan sizeTwelve eggs will serve about six as a lunch dish. An omelet that size needs a very large pan and a confident wrist; two six-egg omelets in a 10-inch pan are easier to roll and no worse for it.
- "One spoonful"An unqualified spoonful is most likely a tablespoon. Either way it acts as a seasoning here, not a body of liquid — the tomato itself supplies the bulk.
- Tomato sauceNot ketchup and not a jarred pasta sauce; a plain cooked tomato sauce is what is meant, and passata or a spoonful of thick canned tomato purée is a reasonable substitute.
- The fifteen minutes matterThat quarter hour is there to drive the water out of the tomato and mushrooms. A wet filling will split the omelet and weep onto the dish, so cook until the mixture mounds on the spoon rather than running.
- Peel the tomatoPeriod recipes often took a scalded and skinned tomato for granted, though this one does not say so. Skins left in can roll up into leathery curls in the finished stew.
- The hinge: a plain omelet is barely cookedThe eggs should be stirred over good heat until they set into soft curds, then left ten or fifteen seconds to catch on the base. The residual heat finishes them after folding; an omelet cooked until firm in the pan turns rubbery on the plate.
- Reserved sauceHolding back a quarter of the stew to spoon around the omelet is a plating instruction, not an afterthought — it keeps the dish from looking bare on the long platter and gives the eggs something to be eaten with.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) was assembled from the working repertoire of the Waldorf, and "Spanish" in the hotel kitchens of the period was shorthand for anything built on tomato, onion and green pepper — the same logic that gave American menus Spanish rice and Spanish sauce. What the recipe records best is the scale of the place: twelve eggs at a stroke, made to be turned out whole onto a long dish.