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Kirsch Omelette
Carefully crack eight fresh eggs into a bowl. Season with a tablespoon fine sugar and half teaspoon salt, half gill cold cream or rich milk. Sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes. Thoroughly heat in a frying pan one tablespoon good clarified butter, drop in the eggs and sharply stir with a fork while briskly cooking for two minutes, then let rest for half a minute; fold the side nearest the handle first, then the opposite side, so that both sides will meet in the centre; let rest for half a minute longer, then carefully turn it on a hot dish. Dredge two tablespoons fine sugar over the omelette, then glaze the sugar on top with a red-hot poker. Pour two and a half tablespoons of Swiss kirsch over it and send to the table. Set fire to the kirsch, and with a tablespoon keep it burning on top and sides of the omelette until a nice colour.
A sweet French-style rolled omelette, sugar-glazed and flamed at the table. Everything hinges on getting it out of the pan while the centre is still soft, since it keeps cooking on the hot dish.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup (2 fl oz) of cream. With eight eggs that is a generous amount of liquid; the omelette will be soft and needs a confident fold.
- Pan sizeEight eggs want a 10- to 12-inch pan. In anything smaller the eggs sit too deep to set in two minutes and you get scrambled curds instead of a foldable sheet.
- Clarified butterSpecified because whole butter's milk solids scorch at the heat needed here. Clarified butter or ghee lets you run the pan hot enough to set the eggs quickly without brown flecks in a dessert omelette.
- The two-minute cookStir briskly only until the eggs are thickened but still glossy and slightly loose in the middle, then stop. The half-minute rests let the base firm enough to fold; residual heat finishes the interior on the way to the table.
- The red-hot pokerThis was a real tool — an iron heated in the fire and passed over sugar to caramelise it. A kitchen blowtorch does the same job, or a broiler preheated as high as it goes, in and out in under a minute. Do not heat a modern poker in a gas flame; the handle and any coating are not made for it.
- Swiss kirschKirschwasser is a dry, unsweetened cherry eau-de-vie, usually 40% alcohol. Cherry brandy and cherry liqueur are sweetened and will not light or taste the same. Warm the kirsch slightly before pouring so it ignites readily.
- Flaming safelyPour the spirit from a measure, never from the bottle, and light it away from the extractor hood, curtains and long hair. Two and a half tablespoons burns out in under a minute; a pan lid or a large plate smothers it if needed.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; eight eggs would serve four or more as a dessert, cut at the table while the sugar is still crisp.
The sweet omelette flamed with spirit belongs to the nineteenth-century restaurant repertoire, where an *omelette au kirsch* or *omelette au rhum* offered a dessert that could be finished in front of the guest — one of a family of dishes, along with crêpes and cherries jubilee, whose appeal was as much theatrical as culinary. Kirschwasser itself is distilled from whole cherries, stones included, in the cherry-growing country straddling the Black Forest, Alsace and northern Switzerland, and Swiss kirsch had a strong reputation in the period. The red-hot poker is the giveaway detail of the era: before the gas salamander was standard equipment, a bar of iron heated in the range fire was how a cook glazed sugar, and the same trick was used on meringues and on mulled ale.