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Tomato Omelet
Scald and skin a large tomato, chop it up and mix in a little minced shallot. Beat the yolks and whites of three eggs separately; then mix the beaten yolks with the tomato and shallot, seasoning with salt and pepper to taste. Put one and one-half ounces of butter into an omelet-pan, and when it is quite hot, add the whites of the eggs to the other mixture, turn it into the pan and cook gently for two or three minutes, stirring often. When done, place the omelet on a dish, and serve.
A soufflé-style omelet in the French manner: the whites are beaten separately and folded in at the last moment, so the pan work matters more than the ingredient list.
- Fold, don't stirThe text says to cook gently for two or three minutes, "stirring often." If you want the whites to stay airy, treat that stirring lightly once they are in and work the pan gently instead; stirred hard throughout, you get scrambled eggs with tomato.
- 1½ ounces of butterThat is three tablespoons, generous for three eggs. In a modern nonstick pan of 8 to 9 inches, two tablespoons is enough.
- Drain the tomatoA skinned, chopped tomato carries a lot of water, and none of it is cooked off here. Let the chopped flesh sit in a sieve for a few minutes, or the omelet will weep and refuse to set.
- Scalding to skinCut a shallow cross in the base, drop into boiling water for 15 to 30 seconds, then into cold water. The skin slips off. Modern tomatoes bred for firmness may need the full 30 seconds.
- Shallot"A little minced shallot" is about one teaspoon. Raw shallot in a two-minute omelet stays sharp; softening it in a little of the butter first gives a rounder result, though it departs from the text.
- Heat"Quite hot" here means the butter foams and the foam is just subsiding, not browning. Medium-high to set the base, then lower for the two or three minutes of gentle cooking.
- YieldThree eggs makes one omelet for a single diner, or a light course for two. The method does not scale up well; omelets of this kind are made one pan at a time.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria from the 1890s, and his 1896 book gathers the hotel's working repertoire alongside a great deal of European standard practice. The separated-egg omelet is squarely French — an *omelette mousseline* in the professional vocabulary — and its presence here reflects how thoroughly American luxury hotel kitchens of the period were staffed and organised on French lines. Tomatoes had by then shed the last of their earlier suspicion in Anglo-American cooking and were common enough to appear as a plain garnish rather than a novelty, while the shallot signals the same French kitchen that supplied the technique. The recipe is typical of the book's brevity: Oscar wrote for cooks who already knew what an omelet-pan was and how it should be treated, and he did not waste words telling them.