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Truffle Omelet
Wash well three or four large truffles; put them into a saucepan with sufficient white wine or champagne to cover them nearly or quite and boil for ten minutes with the lid on the pan. Remove the saucepan to the side of the fire and keep the truffles warm in the stock for half an hour or so. Take them out, peel and chop them up very fine. Beat four eggs in a basin, add a little chopped parsley, salt and pepper, turn the omelet into a fryingpan with about one and one-half ounces of butter made hot, and cook until it is yellow. Put a portion or the whole of the cooked truffles with a little of the liquor they were stewed in, in the center of the omelet, fold it over, place it on a dish, and serve without delay.
A plain French omelet with a truffle filling, written when fresh black truffles were an expensive but obtainable restaurant staple. Most of the work happens before the pan goes on the heat.
- TrufflesThis most likely assumes fresh black winter truffles (Tuber melanosporum), firm and unpeeled; the recipe gives no weight, only "three or four large" ones. Preserved truffles in a jar are already cooked and need no simmering; truffle oil and truffle paste are a different product entirely and should be added off the heat at the end, not stewed.
- PeelingOscar's peeling belongs to an era when truffles arrived caked in soil and the skin was often gritty. A well-brushed modern truffle is used skin and all, and the peel carries a good share of the aroma.
- "The side of the fire"On a coal range this was the cooler edge of the top, holding food at a bare steam without further cooking. Cover the pan, take it off the burner, and let it stand thirty minutes; the point is infusion, not more heat.
- ButterAn ounce and a half is 3 tablespoons, which is generous for four eggs but keeps a heavy pan from catching. Two tablespoons in a 9- or 10-inch nonstick or well-seasoned pan is enough.
- "Cook until it is yellow"This means set and pale, not browned. A French omelet is pulled from the heat while the center is still slightly loose, since it carries on cooking as it folds; total pan time for four eggs is under two minutes over medium-high heat.
- The stewing liquorThe wine the truffles cooked in is the second half of the flavor. Reduce what remains to a spoonful or two of syrupy stock before adding it to the filling, or the omelet will weep onto the plate.
- YieldFour eggs makes one omelet serving two, or one very substantial single portion. It does not scale up in the same pan; cook a second omelet rather than a bigger one.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, and this book records what a New York luxury hotel of the period thought a wealthy guest would order. Fresh truffles reached America packed in earth or tinned; the ten-minute simmer in champagne is a survival of French kitchen practice, where truffles were often cooked in wine or Madeira before being sliced into a sauce or a garnish. The truffle omelet itself is old and standard in French cookery rather than a Waldorf invention, appearing in nineteenth-century manuals as an example of what the plain three- or four-egg omelet could be dressed up to become.