No. 2878

Argentine Omelet

Omelette a l'Argentine

Break six fresh eggs in a bowl; season with salt and white pepper; beat with a whip or fork, and strain through a strainer into another vessel; beat again with a few bits of butter laid here and there. Set an omelet pan on a hot fire, and in it have three ounces of very hot butter; skim, then pour in the eggs all at once; stir lightly with a spoon, and when the eggs begin to thicken bring them forward in the pan; fill the center with peeled eggplant cut in quarter-inch squares, fried in butter and thickened with a little half-glaze (No. 400). Close the omelet with a single stroke of the handle, remove the pan from the fire, and with the spoon close it entirely. Put more butter in the pan, and incline it so that it can slip under the omelet, then color it nicely, and turn it over on a dish; garnish around with an Argentine sauce (No. 429).

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For the Modern Kitchen

A classic French rolled omelet from Delmonico's kitchen, filled with diced eggplant and finished with two sauces the book expects you to look up elsewhere. The technique is straightforward; the cross-references are the obstacle.

YieldSix eggs makes one large omelet serving two to three people. If you want individual portions, work in two pans of three eggs each rather than doubling the time in one.
The cross-referencesNo. 400 is the book's half-glaze, or demi-glace — a reduced brown sauce, and only a spoonful is needed to bind the eggplant. No. 429 is the Argentine sauce. Both are separate preparations elsewhere in The Epicurean; a good commercial demi-glace, loosened, stands in for the filling binder without harming the dish.
Three ounces of butterThat is six tablespoons for a single omelet — generous by modern standards, and suited to a pan far less reliably non-stick than a modern one. In a seasoned carbon-steel or non-stick pan, one to one and a half tablespoons is enough, plus a little more for the final coloring.
Straining the eggsWorth doing. Pushing the beaten eggs through a fine sieve removes the chalazae and any unbroken albumen, so the finished omelet is uniform in color rather than streaked.
The eggplantQuarter-inch dice, salted for twenty minutes and patted dry, then fried in butter until browned and tender before it goes anywhere near the eggs. Raw or undercooked eggplant inside an omelet cooked for ninety seconds will be spongy and bitter.
Heat and timing"A hot fire" means medium-high, not maximum. The whole cooking sequence — pour, stir, gather forward, fill, fold — runs about a minute to ninety seconds. The eggs should still be slightly loose in the center when you fold; carryover heat finishes them.
Closing with the handleThe single stroke is a sharp jerk of the pan handle toward you, which flips the near lip of the omelet over the filling. If that fails, a spatula does the same job less elegantly. More butter then goes in and the pan is tilted so it runs under the omelet, which colors before being turned out onto the dish.
SaucingThe recipe has the sauce go around the omelet rather than over it, which leaves the browned surface intact.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its egg chapter runs to hundreds of numbered variations distinguished by little more than the garnish and the sauce. Names like à l'Argentine in this tradition are often said to be decorative rather than geographical — the French repertoire attached national and place adjectives to standard preparations as a shorthand for a fixed set of accompaniments — though the origin of this particular name is unknown. What is genuinely notable here is the eggplant: it appears throughout Ranhofer's book as a matter of course.