No. 3071

Omelet with Russet Apples

Omelette aux Pommes de Reinette

Cut three russet apples into quarters; peel, mince coarsely and put into a pan with six tablespoonfuls of melted butter; heat well without letting them dissolve. Dilute two tablespoonfuls of flour with two whole eggs and eight tablespoonfuls of raw cream; add to this two spoonfuls of powdered sugar and a grain of salt; pour the preparation over the apples, spreading them on the entire surface of the pan, then as soon as it begins to thicken prick it with a fork to dry the top. Dredge some brown sugar over the omelet and laying an inverted plate over hold it down with the right hand and turn the pan quickly so as to receive the omelet on the plate. Melt more butter in the pan and slipping the omelet into it, heat it well, rolling the pan backward and forward to glaze the sugar without allowing the omelet to adhere, then sprinkle some more of the same sugar over the top and turn it again on the plate; slip it on a dish and serve.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is closer to a thick apple pancake or clafoutis than to a folded egg omelet — the batter is only two eggs bound with flour and cream, and it is cooked on the stovetop in one pan and flipped twice. A few notes before you start.

Pommes de reinetteReinettes are a family of French dessert apples, firm and slightly tart; the translation as "russet" is loose, since the two names overlap only partly. Any firm apple that holds its shape — Braeburn, Golden Delicious, Cox — works; avoid McIntosh, which collapses into sauce and defeats the instruction to heat them "without letting them dissolve."
The measurements in cupsEight tablespoonfuls of cream is 1/2 cup; six tablespoonfuls of melted butter is 3/4 stick. The butter is generous by modern taste and you can cut it to three or four tablespoons without harming the dish. Ranhofer's "tablespoonful" is roughly today's, but these are cook's spoonfuls, not level ones.
Raw creamI.e. plain uncooked cream, as opposed to cream that has been scalded or cooked; the cream of the 1890s kitchen would in any case have been unpasteurized. Use pasteurized heavy cream; it is cooked here regardless.
Pan sizeNo size is given. A 9- or 10-inch skillet with sloping sides gives a cake about half an inch thick, which sets through in the time described. Anything larger and the batter is too thin to survive the flip; nonstick or well-seasoned cast iron makes the two turns far less alarming.
Heat and the forkWork over medium to medium-low. Pricking the surface with a fork lets uncooked batter run down to the pan and dries the top — keep at it until nothing wet rises, or the omelet will tear when you invert it.
The two flipsThe first turn onto an inverted plate is the standard tortilla move: plate firmly over the pan, one hand flat on top, turn in a single decisive motion away from yourself. The second turn is only to caramelize the sugared face, so it needs no more than a minute or two in fresh butter.
Glazing the sugarThe rolling of the pan is the point of the whole recipe. Brown sugar melts and scorches quickly, so keep the pan moving and pull it off the heat the moment the surface is glossy and amber. A broiler for thirty seconds will do the same job.
YieldThree apples, two eggs and half a cup of cream feed two people generously or four as a small course. Serve immediately — the glaze softens within minutes.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the repertoire he cooked at Delmonico's in New York, and its dessert chapters are essentially French. The omelette aux pommes belongs to a broad family of sweet egg-and-fruit pan dishes that runs from the Austrian Kaiserschmarrn to the Limousin clafoutis; what distinguishes this version is the caramelized brown-sugar glaze, achieved by returning the omelet to the pan sugared-side down, a trick shared with the tarte Tatin and with the older practice of glazing sweets under a salamander iron. The reinette named in the French title is not a single variety but a group of apples long favored in French kitchens, prized for keeping their shape and acidity through the winter; the English rendering as "russet" is a reasonable, if imprecise, nineteenth-century equivalence, since both names cover a range of dry-fleshed, russeted keeping apples. Its presence in a book of Delmonico's cookery says something about the restaurant's ambitions: a homely pan dish is here numbered, formalized and set among the hot entremets.