No. 2892

Green Omelet with Fine Herbs, Spinach, or with Sorrel Crusts

Omelette Verte aux Fines Herbes aux Croutes d'Epinards ou d'Oseille

Chop up parsley leaves, chervil, tarragon and clean sorrel leaves, put them into a saucer and mix in some finely shredded chives. Break eight eggs in a bowl, mix with them the chopped herbs, season and beat; melt some butter in an omelet pan, pour in the eggs and stir with a fork to thicken; as soon as the omelet detaches from the pan fold over and turn it out on a long dish; moisten the top with a brush dipped in maitre-d'hotel butter (No. 581) and surround with some hollowed-out bread-crusts filled in with a fine puree of spinach (No. 729); glaze these over also.

With Sorrel.—Chop up a full handful of sorrel leaves, free of stalks; after having them well washed and cleansed, fry in butter and mix with beaten eggs. Make an omelet the same as the above and serve without any garnishing.

← No. 2891 Omelet, German Style Eggs & Omelets No. 2893 Ham and Green Pea Omelet →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a kitchen with maitre d'hotel butter and spinach puree already at hand, and gives no quantities for the herbs. The numbers he cites are cross-references to other pages of The Epicurean.

Herb quantityFor eight eggs, figure on about half a cup of loosely packed chopped herbs in total — parsley and chervil in the lead, tarragon and chives in smaller amounts, since both dominate quickly. Ranhofer gives no quantity for the sorrel in the first version; treat it as a small handful, used more as a seasoning than a filling.
Chervil substitutionFresh chervil is hard to buy and wilts within a day or two of picking. A mix of extra parsley with a little tarragon comes closest; dried chervil contributes almost nothing.
SorrelSorrel collapses to a fraction of its raw bulk and turns olive-drab the moment it hits the pan, which is expected here. Its acidity is the point of the second version — spinach is not a substitute for it.
Maitre d'hotel butter (No. 581)Softened butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper. Brushed over the hot omelet it melts to a glaze; there is no need to make the full quantity a professional kitchen would have kept on hand.
Spinach puree (No. 729)Blanched spinach, squeezed dry and pureed with butter and, in the usual manner, a little cream or bechamel, seasoned and reduced until it holds its shape. It must be stiff enough not to soak through the bread crusts.
The crustsCut dinner-roll or baguette sections, hollow them out and fry or toast them so they are crisp and dry before filling. Filled ahead of time they go limp.
The hingeEight eggs is too many for one pan if you want a tender omelet. Work in two pans, or two batches of four eggs, over moderate heat — stirring with the fork until the curds just set and folding while the centre is still glossy. An eight-egg omelet cooked long enough to "detach" cleanly in one mass will be dry.
YieldEight eggs serve four as a course, or two generously. The garnished version needs about six to eight filled crusts.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York across two stints spanning some three decades, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire set down in print, complete with the internal cross-references that make it read like a professional manual rather than a home cookbook. The dish itself is straightforwardly French: omelette aux fines herbes, with fines herbes conventionally meaning the classic quartet of parsley, chervil, tarragon and chives, a combination usually treated as fixed by convention rather than by any datable codification, and still generally defined that way. What marks it as restaurant cooking is the garnish of croûtes spread with spinach puree and glazed, which turns a five-minute egg dish into something that can cross a dining room. Sorrel, the alternative here, was a common kitchen-garden green in both France and America at the time and has since largely fallen out of the market, surviving mainly in soups and sauces for oily fish, where its acidity does the work lemon does elsewhere.