No. 2908

Truffle Omelet

Omelette aux Truffes

Mince some cooked peeled truffles and put them in a sautoir to mingle with either allemande sauce (No. 407) or else half-glaze sauce (No. 413) with Madeira. Fill the inside of an omelet with these truffles and pour the sauce around.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you have a kitchen with stock sauces already on hand; the whole of the work here is in the two components he only cross-references. Read it as an assembly note rather than a recipe.

The sauce is the recipeAllemande (No. 407) is a velouté enriched and thickened with an egg-yolk and cream liaison; half-glaze (No. 413) is what is now written demi-glace, a reduced brown sauce. Neither is a five-minute job, and a good store-bought demi-glace with a splash of Madeira stirred in is the practical route. Allemande has no real commercial equivalent.
SautoirA straight-sided shallow pan, roughly what is sold today as a sauté pan or a wide saucier. It is used here only to warm the minced truffles through in the sauce, not to brown anything.
Cooked peeled trufflesRanhofer means truffles peeled and gently cooked, usually in Madeira or stock. Tinned or jarred black truffles are already cooked and peeled and go straight in; fresh truffle needs only a minute in the warm sauce, off a hard boil, or the aroma cooks off.
QuantitiesNone are given. For a three-egg omelet, figure on 2 to 3 tablespoons of minced truffle bound with about 3 tablespoons of sauce inside, and another 3 to 4 tablespoons poured around the plate.
Which truffleThe recipe does not say which. The Epicurean's truffles are generally black ones of the Périgord type, which stand up to a brown Madeira sauce. Summer truffle is milder and cheaper and tends to be lost against demi-glace; white truffle is usually served raw and shaved, and sits poorly in a cooked sauce.
The omelet itselfRanhofer gives no method here; the omelet is assumed from his other entries, in the French manner, rolled and softly set rather than browned. Filling and folding takes seconds, so have the truffle mixture warm and the plate ready before the eggs meet the pan.
YieldOne omelet, serving one as a course in a longer meal or two as a small first course.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working system set down in print, which is why so many of its entries are two lines long and point elsewhere: the sauces, garnishes and stocks were all standing preparations in the brigade. Truffle omelets belong to the classical French repertoire this kitchen imported wholesale, and the choice offered here between allemande and Madeira half-glaze is a choice between the white and brown branches of that sauce system, applied to the same filling. Truffles reached American tables in the nineteenth century largely in preserved form, which is one reason Ranhofer can call for them casually and assume they are already cooked and peeled. The dish is a good measure of what a Gilded Age restaurant meant by simplicity: eggs and a little truffle, resting on a sauce drawn from the kitchen's standing preparations.