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Fresh Strawberry Omelette
Pick off the stems, carefully wash and thoroughly drain a pint of fresh, ripe strawberries. Place in a bowl with two ounces powdered sugar, half a teaspoon vanilla essence, a teaspoon rum and two tablespoons water, mix well in the seasoning and let infuse for fifteen minutes. Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill cream, two saltspoons salt, two tablespoons sugar and sharply beat up with fork for two minutes. Heat half an ounce butter in a frying pan, drop in eggs, mix with fork for two minutes, let rest half minute; place one-fourth of the strawberries in centre of omelette, fold up the two opposite sides to join in centre, let rest for half minute only. Turn it on a hot dish, sprinkle two tablespoons sugar over the omelette, glaze surface with a red iron, arrange balance of the strawberries and juice around omelette and serve.
A sweet omelette in the Delmonico manner: eight eggs, macerated berries, and a caramelised sugar crust. The whole thing takes about five minutes at the stove, so have the strawberries steeped and the serving dish warm before the butter goes in.
- The hinge: keep it underdoneThe omelette is folded after roughly two and a half minutes and rests only thirty seconds before it leaves the pan. Sweet omelettes carry residual heat well, and an egg set firm in the pan will be dry by the time it reaches the table.
- Half a gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so this is 1/4 cup (about 60 ml). Heavy or single cream both work; it is there to soften the set, not to enrich much.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, so two saltspoons is 1/2 teaspoon of salt for eight eggs. That is correct for a sweet omelette and should not be cut.
- Two ounces powdered sugarA weight, not a volume: about 55 g. Note that 'powdered sugar' in cookbooks of this date usually meant finely ground granulated sugar rather than modern confectioners' sugar; either will dissolve into the juice over the fifteen-minute maceration.
- Glazing with a red ironThe original means a salamander, a heavy iron disc heated in the fire and passed over the sugar to caramelise it. A kitchen blowtorch does the same job; a very hot broiler for under a minute is the alternative, watching constantly, since the sugar goes from amber to burnt quickly on a surface this soft.
- Pan sizeEight eggs want a large pan, 10 to 12 inches, to fold cleanly. In a smaller pan the omelette will be thicker and slower to set, and harder to fold without breaking.
- Vanilla essence and rumEssence here is what we call extract. The teaspoon of rum is flavouring rather than structure and can be left out without altering the method; dark rum gives more than white.
- YieldServes four generously as a dessert or a late breakfast, three as a main course. It does not hold, so it should be cut and served straight from the hot dish.
The International Cook Book belongs to the era when American hotel and restaurant cookery was still explicitly French in method, and the sweet omelette is one of the clearest survivals of that training: the same pan technique as a savoury omelette, finished with sugar and a salamander glaze instead of herbs. By the early twentieth century rail shipment had widened the season in which strawberries reached restaurant kitchens, though a recipe calling for a pint of ripe berries still assumes fruit at its peak. The red iron points to professional practice, where an iron kept hot in the range fire was ordinary equipment -- though salamanders also appear in domestic manuals of the period, so the tool alone does not settle who the instructions were written for.