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Banana Omelette
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill cream, a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Sharply beat with fork two minutes. Finely slice two peeled bananas, place in a frying pan with tablespoon melted butter and fry five minutes, briskly tossing meanwhile. Drop in the eggs, sharply mix with fork two minutes, let rest a half minute, fold up sides to meet in the centre, let rest one minute, then turn on a hot dish and serve.
A large sweet-savoury omelette in the French style, folded rather than flipped. The only conversions you need are the old liquid and dry measures.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 2 fluid ounces — 1/4 cup of cream.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of white pepper is 1/2 teaspoon, which is assertive but correct against the sweetness of the fruit.
- Pan sizeEight eggs will not set properly in a small skillet. Use a 12-inch pan, and if yours is smaller, cook this in two batches rather than crowding it.
- Five minutes on the bananasSliced bananas soften fast. The recipe asks only for brisk tossing over five minutes; stop as soon as the slices are golden and still holding their shape rather than collapsing.
- More butter than a tablespoonOne tablespoon in a 12-inch pan will not keep eight eggs from sticking. Two to three tablespoons is realistic in any pan without a modern nonstick coating.
- The hingeThe rests are the whole method. Stirring sets the curds; then the pan is left alone for half a minute so the base firms enough to fold, and the further minute comes after folding, before it is turned out. Move it too early and the omelette tears.
- DonenessAs written this comes out soft in the middle, in the French manner. If you want it fully set, add a minute of rest before folding rather than more stirring, which toughens the eggs.
- YieldEight eggs serves three to four as a main course, or cut into wedges for six at breakfast.
Filippini's International Cook Book gathers dishes under a broadly cosmopolitan banner, and this one belongs to a family of sweet-fruit omelettes — apple, apricot, banana — of the kind that turns up on hotel and restaurant breakfast cards of the period. What dates it is the banana itself: bananas became steadily cheaper and more plentiful in American kitchens in the decades before this book, as steam shipping brought Caribbean fruit north in quantity from the 1870s and 1880s onward; purpose-built refrigerated banana ships came later. A cook of 1850 would have thought a banana an expensive curiosity; by 1906 Filippini could assume two of them in a well-stocked larder. White pepper rather than black is often preferred in pale egg dishes, to avoid dark flecks.