No. 3056

Small Celestine Omelets

Petites Omelettes Celestine

Make a dozen small omelets, and when done slip them on a baking sheet and cover four of them with cream frangipane (No. 44) and chopped or finely cut-up candied fruits, four with apple marmalade (No. 3675) and almonds, and four with strawberry marmalade. Fold over flat or else roll them and cut off the ends; divide each one in two and arrange them in a pyramid form on a hot dish; pour over some apricot sauce with rum, and dredge over the surface pistachios and sweet almonds cut in dice and two spoonfuls of dry currants; serve at once.

← No. 3055 Munich with Peaches Hot Entremets — Puddings, Fritters & Soufflés No. 3057 Celestine Omelet with Whipped Cream →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with a pastry section already stocked, so the work here is assembly and timing rather than technique. The hinge is that twelve sweet omelets go cold and leathery fast: have every filling, the sauce and the garnish finished and warm before the first egg hits the pan.

What a "small omelet" isThe recipe does not specify size; two eggs each, cooked in butter in a 6-7 inch pan, is a reasonable working scale. Twelve of them, each halved, gives twenty-four pieces for the pyramid.
Keep them softThese are folded or rolled and then sauced, so they must come out of the pan still moist in the centre. An omelet cooked dry will crack when rolled and turn rubbery under hot apricot sauce.
The baking sheetIt reads as a holding surface rather than an oven step. Slide the omelets on, fill them, and hold them only briefly somewhere warm while you finish the rest; the recipe gives no oven and no temperature.
"Marmalade" hereIn this book marmalade means a thick reduced fruit paste, not citrus preserve. Apple marmalade is apples cooked down with sugar to a stiff purée; strawberry marmalade the same with strawberries. Good thick jam or a stiff fruit butter stands in.
Cream frangipaneFrangipane cream in this period is pastry-cream-based -- milk, eggs, sugar, flour and ground almonds or macaroons -- rather than the raw almond-and-butter frangipane of a modern tart. Use a thick creme patissiere with ground almonds folded in. (Ranhofer's No. 44 is cross-referenced but not given here.)
Apricot sauce with rumSieved apricot jam let down with a little sugar syrup or water, brought to a simmer, then finished off the heat with dark rum. It should coat, not flood; a couple of tablespoons of rum for a cup of sauce is enough.
Dry currantsDried Zante currants, the small black raisins, not fresh redcurrants. Plump them briefly in warm water or rum and drain well so they do not bleed into the sauce.
NutsBlanch and peel the pistachios for colour, and dice the sweet almonds rather than slivering them: the recipe says "cut in dice", and "dredge" here simply means to scatter over the surface.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the vast record of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, where the hot entremets arrived late in a long menu and were expected to be showy. Omelettes Célestine belong to a nineteenth-century French family of sweet omelets filled with jam or pastry cream, folded or rolled and glazed or sauced; the name is generally traced to the practice of naming garnishes after women, saints or society figures rather than to any single documented cook. What is distinctive here is the restaurant logic: three different fillings across a dozen omelets, each halved and stacked into a pyramid, so that one dish reads as three desserts at once. The neighbouring entries in the book — a Célestine omelet with whipped cream, and a separate formula, No. 3055, for a Munich omelet with peaches — show how such dishes were spun out to fill a menu that changed daily.