No. 3070

Omelet with Puree of Spinach—Sweet

Omelette Sucree a la Puree d'Epinards

Blanch quickly in salt water in a copper basin a few handfuls of new spinach, having it very clean, tender and fresh--this is most important. When well drained and squeezed chop or pound and press it through a sieve. Cook some butter to hazel-nut (No. 567) in a saucepan, mix in with it three or four spoonfuls of the spinach and fry until the moisture is thoroughly evaporated, then add a handful of powdered lady fingers, a little sugar and a few spoonfuls of raw cream. Cook the whole from four to five minutes, remove and put in a bit of lemon peel and a piece of butter. Prepare a sweet omelet with seven or eight beaten eggs, and as soon as it thickens bring it to the front of the pan and fill it with the puree; fold over and invert it on a small, long dish; shape it prettily with the two ends finished in a point; bestrew with powdered sugar and glaze under a salamander (Fig. 123) or with an iron three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter heated red hot in the fire.

← No. 3069 Omelet with Fruits, Meringued Hot Entremets — Puddings, Fritters & Soufflés No. 3071 Omelet with Russet Apples →

For the Modern Kitchen

A sweet spinach omelet reads oddly now, but it belongs to a long line of European sweet greens dishes. The whole thing hinges on driving the water out of the spinach purée; anything wetter than a thick paste will bleed into the eggs and the omelet will not hold its shape.

The hinge: dry the puréeAfter sieving, the spinach must be fried in the butter until it stops steaming and pulls away from the pan in a mass. Ranhofer says "until the moisture is thoroughly evaporated" and means it literally; a slack purée makes a weeping omelet that cannot be rolled or glazed.
Butter cooked to hazelnutRanhofer's No. 567 is beurre noisette: butter melted and cooked until the milk solids turn nut-brown and it smells toasted. Take it off before it blackens, since the flavour is the point of the step.
The copper basinBlanching greens in a copper basin was an old trick for holding colour, copper ions stabilising the chlorophyll. Any wide pan of well-salted boiling water will do: blanch briefly, then cool and squeeze hard in a towel. The recipe stresses only that the spinach be clean, tender and fresh.
Lady fingersPowdered lady fingers means dried sponge-finger biscuits crushed to fine crumbs; here they act as the binder, with sugar added separately alongside them. The quantity is left as "a handful."
Raw cream"Raw" here means simply unheated, not soured or scalded, and dates from the era before pasteurisation was standard. Plain pasteurised heavy cream is the correct substitute, and it is cooked for several minutes in the purée anyway.
Spoonfuls"Three or four spoonfuls" of spinach and "a few spoonfuls" of cream are genuinely imprecise in the original. Work by texture instead: enough cream to loosen the purée to a thick paste, then reduce it back down.
The salamanderRanhofer gives two options: a salamander, an iron implement heated in the fire and held over sugar to caramelise it without cooking what lies beneath, or failing that a small iron rod heated red hot. A kitchen blowtorch does the same job; a broiler set very high will work but risks puffing and cracking the omelet.
YieldSeven or eight eggs makes one large omelet, served on a small, long dish as the recipe directs. Glazed sugar is best taken to the table promptly.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete record of that repertoire, which is why this page sits in a long numbered run of sweet omelets: with fruits, with russet apples, meringued. Sweet spinach preparations were not a novelty of his invention but a survival from an older European tradition in which spinach and other greens turned up freely in sweet tarts and puddings, the torta di erbe of Italy and the spinach tarts of English and French cookery among them. The pairing of greens with sugar, cream and dried biscuit crumbs is entirely of that lineage. What marks the recipe as late nineteenth-century restaurant work is the finish: the insistence on shaping the omelet to points at both ends, and the red-hot iron drawn across the sugar, are the gestures of a kitchen where a dessert had to arrive looking composed as well as tasting of anything.