No. 3063

Omelet Souffle with Apples

Omelette Soufflee aux Pommes

Prepare an omelet souffle preparation exactly the same as for a light omelet souffle (No. 3061). Cut four or five good apples in quarters, peel, core and mince, then put them into a pan with warm butter, and toss on a moderate fire; besprinkle with sugar, and cook without letting them melt; then remove the pan from the fire to thicken the contents with two or three spoonfuls of apricot marmalade (No. 3675). Have four spoonfuls of clarified butter in a large frying-pan; when hot pour in the omelet preparation, heat it for two minutes, then push the pan into a slack oven to cook the omelet; when firm slip it on a large sheet of paper, then turn it over again into the pan after having buttered it once more. When done slip it on the paper again and fill it with the apples. Roll it on itself, dress on a dish, bestrew the surface with sugar, then glaze.

← No. 3062 Omelet Souffle with Almonds Hot Entremets — Puddings, Fritters & Soufflés No. 3064 Omflet Souffle with Macaroons →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes you have already read No. 3061 and can make the base blind: yolks beaten with sugar and flavouring, folded into stiffly whipped whites. Everything here hangs on speed — a soufflé omelet holds its lift for a few minutes only.

The hinge: work fast and serve at onceOnce the whites are folded in, the batter must go into the hot pan immediately and the finished omelet to the table immediately. Any wait between filling, rolling and glazing costs you the rise; assemble the apples and have the dish warmed before the eggs are whipped.
A slack ovenBy later conversion tables, somewhere in the region of 250-300F; Ranhofer gives no temperature. The point is to set the interior gently without colouring or drying it - a hot oven will crust the surface and collapse the middle.
"Spoonfuls"Ranhofer's spoonful is generally taken as a tablespoon. On that reading four spoonfuls of clarified butter is about 1/4 cup, which is generous but correct for a large pan; two or three spoonfuls of apricot marmalade is about 2-3 tablespoons.
Apricot marmaladeNo. 3675 is Ranhofer's own apricot preserve. Ordinary apricot jam warmed and pushed through a sieve to remove skins is the practical stand-in; its job here is to bind the apple, not to sweeten it.
The applesFour or five apples is roughly 1.5 lb before peeling. Use a variety that holds its shape — the instruction to cook them "without letting them melt" rules out anything that collapses into sauce. Mince here means a fine dice, not a purée.
Clarified butter, not wholeWhole butter at the heat needed for this pan will brown and speckle the omelet. Clarified butter is specified for a reason and is worth the extra step.
The paperA large sheet of parchment stands in for Ranhofer's sheet of paper. Slipping the omelet out, re-buttering the pan and returning the omelet to it is how the second side is set; a wide, well-seasoned or nonstick pan makes this considerably less nervous.
To glazeNineteenth-century kitchens used a salamander — an iron plate heated red and held over the sugar. A broiler set high, with the dish close beneath it for under a minute, or a blowtorch, does the same job. Watch it continuously; the sugar goes from amber to black quickly.
YieldA large omelet of this kind serves four to six as a dessert course; the egg count comes from the base preparation, No. 3061.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York for some three decades, and The Epicurean (1894) is the record of that kitchen rather than a home cookbook - hence the terse cross-references to numbered base preparations, which assume a brigade where someone else has already made No. 3061 and No. 3675. The omelette soufflée is a French restaurant sweet of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: not a true soufflé baked in a mould but a whipped-white omelet, set partly on the stove and finished in the oven, which puffs dramatically and then subsides. Apples with apricot glaze is a standard pairing in French pastry of the period, appearing in everything from tarts to charlottes; the apricot supplies the acidity and gloss that cooked apple lacks on its own. Ranhofer gives a whole run of these omelets - almond, macaroon, apple - differing only in the filling, which tells you how routine a dessert-course item it was on a grand menu.