No. 2887

Desjardins Omelet

Omelette a la Desjardins

Fry in oil (for three eggs) one peeled tomato cut across in two, pressed and divided in small three-eighth inch squares, half as much minced fresh mushrooms, a little onion cut in squares and fried in butter, olives cut in eight pieces, salt, cayenne, nutmeg, chopped parsley and meat-glaze (No. 402). With this preparation fill the inside of a parsley omelet (No 2903); decorate the top with thin anchovy fillets to imitate lozenges; fill each one of these through a cornet with solid tomatoed bearnaise sauce (No. 433), and on each point set a little bit of chopped parsley; pour around a half-glaze sauce (No. 413), finished with lemon juice and plenty of butter.

← No. 2886 Cream Omelet—Plain Eggs & Omelets No. 2888 Duxelle or Cooked Fine Herb Omelet →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes in cross-references, assuming you have a garde-manger's larder on hand. Read this as a warm, dry tomato-mushroom-olive garnish rolled into a French omelet and finished with two sauces.

The hinge: keep the filling dryTomato and mushroom both shed water, and a wet filling will split a rolled omelet and thin the sauce. Fry the diced tomato hard in the oil until the moisture is gone, cook the mushrooms separately until they squeak, then combine off the heat with the glaze so the mixture is glossy rather than soupy.
Meat-glaze (No. 402)Ranhofer's glace de viande is brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. A spoonful of good reduced veal or beef stock, or a commercial demi-glace concentrate used sparingly, does the same job; it is a seasoning here, not a sauce.
Half-glaze sauce (No. 413)Demi-glace: brown sauce and stock reduced together and strained. The instruction to finish it with lemon juice and "plenty of butter" matters more than its provenance -- whisk cold butter in off the heat so the sauce stays emulsified and pours in a ribbon around the plate.
Tomatoed bearnaise (No. 433)Bearnaise with tomato puree beaten in, essentially a sauce Choron. It must be stiff enough to hold a piped shape, so reduce the tomato to a paste first and keep the sauce warm, not hot, or it will break.
Parsley omelet (No. 2903)Simply a plain French omelet with a generous quantity of chopped parsley beaten into the eggs. Roll it soft and slightly underdone in the centre; the residual heat and the filling will finish it.
CornetA cone of parchment or greaseproof paper with the tip snipped, the nineteenth-century equivalent of a small piping bag. A disposable piping bag with a plain 3 mm tip is the modern equivalent.
Olives and anchoviesThe recipe specifies only olives, cut in eight, and thin anchovy fillets sliced into strips; the type of olive and the packing of the anchovies are left open. Both are salty and the meat-glaze is saltier still, so season the eggs lightly and taste the filling before adding any salt at all.
Quantities and yield"For three eggs" sets the scale: one omelet, one or two servings. Ranhofer gives one whole peeled tomato, halved and pressed, with half as much minced mushroom, a little diced onion and an unspecified few olives cut in eight.
AssemblyEverything -- filling, both sauces, the anchovy strips -- must be ready before the eggs go in the pan. The omelet is on the plate for under a minute before it starts to weep, so decorate fast and serve immediately.

A Little History

This is one of dozens of garnished omelets in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York. The book is organised as a professional reference rather than a domestic cookbook, which is why the recipe reads as a chain of numbers: a working brigade already had glace de viande, demi-glace and a bearnaise on the stove, and the chef's contribution was the assembly and the decoration. Names like "a la Desjardins" were applied freely in this period, often for a patron, a colleague or simply a plausible-sounding French surname, and no particular Desjardins is documented behind this one. What the dish does record is the era's taste for elaborate finish -- anchovy lozenges piped full of sauce and dotted with parsley, on an object that will be eaten in four minutes -- and the assumption that an omelet was a canvas for a garnish rather than a supper in itself.