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Apple Omelette
Peel, core and cut into small dice pieces two very sound apples. Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill cream, season with a saltspoon salt and a tablespoon sugar. Beat up with a fork for two minutes. Heat a teaspoon butter in a frying pan, add the apples and briskly fry them for five minutes, tossing once in a while; drop in the eggs, mix with a fork for two minutes, let rest for half a minute; fold up the two opposite sides to meet in centre, let rest for one minute, then turn it out on a hot dish; sprinkle two tablespoons sugar and pour a good quarter gill rum over, set fire to the rum and serve.
A sweet omelette finished at the table with burning rum — closer to a French omelette aux pommes than to anything a modern brunch menu would recognise. The measurements need translating and the fat is badly understated.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so a half gill of cream is 4 tablespoons and "a good quarter gill" of rum is about 2 tablespoons, poured generously. A saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon.
- The butter is too littleA teaspoon will not carry two diced apples through five minutes of frying, let alone release an eight-egg omelette. Use 2 tablespoons for the apples and add a little more before the eggs go in.
- Pan sizeEight eggs need a 10- to 12-inch pan. In anything smaller the curd sets too thick to fold and the centre stays raw while the base browns.
- Apple choice"Very sound" means firm and unbruised. A dense variety — Braeburn, Granny Smith, Boskoop — holds its dice through frying; softer eating apples collapse into sauce.
- Heat controlKeep the pan at moderate heat once the eggs go in. The two minutes of stirring with a fork builds soft curds; the half-minute rest sets the underside enough to fold. Sugar in the eggs browns fast, so watch the base.
- Flaming the rumWarm the rum in a small pan first — cold spirit will not catch. Take it off the heat before you light it, keep it away from the extractor hood and any overhanging cupboard, and let the flame burn out before serving rather than blowing on it.
- YieldEight eggs give a substantial omelette for three, four at a light meal. It does not hold; serve it the moment the flame dies.
Sweet omelettes were standard in nineteenth-century French cookery and travelled into English and American books as a supper or dessert dish, filled with jam, rum-soaked fruit, or apples softened in butter. This one belongs to the flaming tradition that hotel and restaurant kitchens are often said to have leaned on around 1900, when a dish arriving alight may have been as much a part of the service as a novelty — the same impulse behind crêpes suzette. Filippini's book gathers such dishes under headings that promise the world's cooking, and the apple omelette is the kind of thing a professional cook could produce in five minutes from what was already in the larder: eggs, cream, apples, sugar, and spirits. The rum matters less for flavour than for the show, leaving a faint caramel edge on the sugar.