No. 2901
Oyster Omelet
Omelette aux Huitres
Ranhofer writes for a professional kitchen where the sauces already exist in the pot, so the whole dish is expressed as three cross-references. Read it as: poach oysters briefly, bind them in a rich sauce, use them to fill a rolled omelet.
- The hinge: barely blanch the oystersBring the oysters up in their own liquor only until the edges ruffle, 30 to 60 seconds, then lift them out. They will cook again in the hot sauce and again inside the omelet; anything approaching a real simmer leaves them rubbery.
- Strain the liquorOyster liquor carries shell grit and sand. Pour it through a fine sieve or a coffee filter before reducing it into the sauce, or the finished filling will be gritty.
- What the cross-references meanVeloute (No. 415) is a white stock sauce thickened with pale roux; bechamel (No. 409) is the milk version. Either works. "Roll in" here means fold the drained oysters through the sauce, not coat them individually.
- The egg-yolk liaisonYolks whisked into the reduced sauce must be tempered with a ladle of the hot sauce first and then held below about 180F. Boil it and the yolks curdle into grains. Off the heat is the safest place to finish it, with the cream and butter going in last.
- Finishing "the same as an Argentine omelet"No. 2878 is a filled omelet: eggs beaten and cooked quickly in butter in a hot pan, kept soft, the garnish spooned down the centre and the omelet rolled onto the plate. The details of that cross-referenced recipe are not given here.
- SaltReduced oyster liquor is intensely saline. Season the sauce only after the reduction, and season the eggs lightly.
- Quantities and yieldNone are given. For a two- to three-portion omelet, figure 6 eggs, about 12 shucked oysters and 1/2 to 2/3 cup of finished sauce. Rolled omelets do not hold; cook and serve one at a time.
The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef of Delmonico's in New York, and its structure explains the terseness of this entry: some three and a half thousand numbered recipes, each leaning on the sauces and methods numbered elsewhere, so that a cook already holding a pot of veloute needs only a line of direction. Oysters appear throughout the book in a way that is hard to imagine now. New York harbour and the beds around Long Island supplied them by the cartload, and they were cheap enough to be a filling, a garnish or a stuffing rather than a luxury in themselves. The nineteenth-century American oyster trade was vast and, by the early twentieth century, largely fished and polluted out. The name of the pattern recipe here, the "Argentine omelet", follows the convention of the period, in which filled omelets were labelled after places, patrons and public figures more or less at the chef's discretion.