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Chocolate Omelette with Kirsch
Place in a saucepan two ounces grated chocolate with a tablespoon water and stir on fire with wooden spoon until thoroughly melted. Place on a table, add five egg yolks, two tablespoons powdered sugar, a tablespoon cream, two teaspoons kirsch, and thoroughly mix with wooden spoon. Beat up whites of the five eggs to a stiff froth, add to the preparation and gently mix for two minutes. Heat an ounce fresh butter in a black frying pan, drop in preparation, sharply mix with fork for two minutes and let rest a minute; fold up opposite sides to meet in centre, let rest for a minute, turn on hot dish and serve.
A sweet soufflé omelette, cooked entirely on the stovetop and folded rather than baked. The whole thing takes under ten minutes once the eggs are separated, so have the serving dish warm before you start.
- The hingeThe whites go in at the last moment and are folded, not stirred — "gently mix for two minutes" means fold until just combined, and two minutes is generous. Overwork them and the omelette cooks flat and dense instead of puffing.
- "Grated chocolate"In period usage this was more likely a plain eating or cooking chocolate than modern unsweetened baking chocolate. Two ounces of a 55–60% dark chocolate is a reasonable match; the recipe already carries two tablespoons of sugar.
- MeltingTwo ounces of chocolate with a single tablespoon of water is a seizing risk over direct heat. Use the lowest flame or a bowl over barely simmering water, and stir until smooth before it gets hot enough to stiffen.
- "Place on a table"This means take the pan off the fire and set it down to cool a little. Yolks stirred into chocolate that is still hot from the stove will scramble.
- The black frying panA well-seasoned cast iron or carbon steel omelette pan, roughly 9–10 inches. Nonstick works and is more forgiving here, given how loose the mixture is.
- "Sharply mix with fork"The classic omelette motion: stir the setting egg through the liquid for the first thirty to sixty seconds, then stop and let the base set undisturbed. Two full minutes of stirring will scramble it; the instruction is a maximum, not a target.
- KirschGenuine kirschwasser — a dry, unsweetened cherry eau-de-vie, not a sweet cherry liqueur. Two teaspoons is the whole of the flavouring, so a cheap imitation shows.
- Doneness and yieldFive eggs makes a substantial omelette for two, or three at the end of a meal. It should be set at the edges and still visibly moist and creamy inside when it is folded; it firms further on the hot dish.
- FinishingThe recipe says only to turn it onto a hot dish and serve; sweet omelettes of this kind were often dusted with powdered sugar. It collapses within a few minutes, so it cannot be held.
Sweet omelettes belong to a long French line — the omelette soufflée appears in nineteenth-century restaurant cookery as a fast dessert that could be produced to order. Kirsch — cherry eau-de-vie from the Rhine valley and the Black Forest — is a common flavouring for chocolate desserts in the classical repertoire, as in Black Forest cake. The wooden spoon and the "black" pan are professional habit rather than superstition: wood does not scratch a tinned copper saucepan, and a blackened iron pan was commonly kept for eggs alone.