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Omelette, Celestine
Crack a fresh egg in a small pan, adding yolks of two eggs, a heavy teaspoon flour, two tablespoons fine sugar and half teaspoon vanilla essence. Sharply stir with wooden spoon for two minutes, then pour in two gills milk and half ounce good butter, place pan on fire and sharply stir with wooden spoon for ten minutes, or until well thickened and very smooth. Carefully crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill cream, two saltspoons salt, a tablespoon fine sugar, and sharply beat with fork for two minutes. Heat a tablespoon good butter in a frying pan, drop in the eggs, briskly stir with fork for two minutes, let rest for half minute, carefully spread preparation over omelette, fold up opposite sides to meet in centre, let rest for a minute, then turn on a hot dish. Sprinkle two tablespoons fine sugar over, carefully glaze surface with a red poker or salamander, pour a groseilles-maraschino sauce around the omelette and serve.
A sweet omelette with a vanilla pastry cream folded inside, caramelised on top and sauced with redcurrant. Two separate cookings, and the first one is where it goes wrong.
- The custard is the hingeThat first mixture is a pastry cream: whole egg, two yolks, flour, sugar, milk and butter. Cook it over medium heat, stirring constantly, and let it come only to a bare bubble so the flour loses its raw taste. Rushed over high heat it scrambles, and ten minutes of hard stirring on a modern burner will scorch it.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of milk is one cup and half a gill of cream is a quarter cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making two saltspoons half a teaspoon of salt for eight eggs.
- Fine sugar"Fine sugar" means caster or superfine, not confectioners'. Ordinary granulated works in the custard but is grainier in the finishing sprinkle.
- Vanilla essenceRead it as vanilla extract, half a teaspoon. Essences of the period varied in strength and were usually alcohol-based; taste the finished cream before deciding it needs more.
- Sugar in the eggs browns fastA tablespoon of sugar in the beaten eggs means the omelette colours much sooner than a savoury one. Keep the pan at medium, use a 10- to 12-inch nonstick or well-seasoned pan, and pull it while the surface is still glossy and barely set.
- The red poker and the salamanderBoth are ways of caramelising the sugar from above without cooking the eggs further. A kitchen blowtorch does the same job; a broiler at full heat will work if the dish is close to the element and watched, but it dries the omelette.
- Groseilles-maraschino sauceGroseilles are redcurrants. The recipe gives no method; the likely reading is redcurrant jelly warmed until pourable and loosened with maraschino liqueur, a spoonful at a time, then poured around rather than over the omelette.
- YieldEight eggs and a cup of pastry cream serve three to four as a dessert or brunch course. The pastry cream can be made hours ahead and kept covered in the refrigerator, but bring it back to spreading consistency before the omelette goes in the pan.
Sweet omelettes filled with pastry cream, sugared and branded with a hot iron were common closing dishes in French-trained restaurant kitchens of the late nineteenth century, and personal-name garnishes - Célestine, Georgette, Jeanne - generally served as catalogue labels for such variations rather than as a record of any particular person. The International Cook Book (1906) is generally attributed to Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and the clipped phrasing here - crack, stir sharply, two minutes, ten minutes, turn out - is characteristic of him. The salamander was an iron plate on a handle heated in the fire and held over sugar or a sauce to brown it, and in a kitchen without a top-heat broiler a poker left in the coals did the same work. It is the same operation now performed with a blowtorch on a crème brûlée.