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Omelette, Col. O'Brien
Split three very fresh lamb kidneys in halves, skin and cut each half in two. Cut three country sausages into half-inch pieces, place both in a frying pan with a tablespoon melted butter, season with two saltspoons salt and fry for five minutes. Drain, place in a small frying pan with six heads mushrooms cut in halves, two tablespoons sherry, one gill demi-glace and half saltspoon cayenne pepper. Mix a little and let boil for five minutes, then keep hot. Prepare an omelette, turn on a hot dish, pour the sauce over and serve.
A savoury omelette garnish of kidney, sausage and mushroom in a sherried brown sauce. The measurements are hotel-kitchen shorthand, and the sauce assumes a stockpot you probably do not have.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the salt here is about half a teaspoon and the cayenne about an eighth of a teaspoon.
- Demi-glaceEspagnole sauce combined with brown stock and reduced by about half — the standard sauce base of a professional kitchen of the period. Half a cup of good reduced beef or veal stock, glossy enough to coat a spoon, stands in; a commercial demi-glace concentrate diluted to half strength also works. Do not substitute thin stock, or the sauce will slide off the omelette.
- Kidneys are the hingeLamb kidneys turn grainy and metallic the moment they overcook. Split, peel the membrane, snip out the white core, then sear them hard and briefly. If you follow the five minutes of frying plus five minutes of boiling literally they will be tough — sear them a minute or two, remove, and return them to the sauce only in the last thirty seconds.
- Country sausagesFresh coarse pork sausage, uncured and unsmoked, sold in links or in bulk. Cut into half-inch pieces they cook through quickly, but check that they reach 160F before serving; the sauce stage will finish them if the frying has not.
- Mushroom heads"Heads" means the caps, stems trimmed off. Six medium white or cremini caps, halved, is the intent.
- The omeletteNo egg count is given. A French-style rolled omelette of three eggs cooked in butter, still soft in the centre, matches the scale of the garnish.
- YieldTwo servings as a lunch or supper dish. Have the sauce hot and the plate warm before the eggs go in the pan; the omelette cannot wait.
Named dishes like this one are a fossil of restaurant practice of the sort the book reflects, when a cook is often said to have flattered a regular customer or an employer by attaching his name to a garnish, and the name then travelled into print with no explanation of who he was. Who Colonel O'Brien was is not recorded here, and the omelette tells us more about the kitchen than the man: kidney, sausage, mushroom and demi-glace are the standard furniture of the English and Anglo-American savoury course, and a pan of demi-glace simmering all day is what made such a dish a five-minute job to order. Lamb kidneys were cheap, plentiful and eaten with far less hesitation than now, appearing at breakfast as readily as at supper — the *International Cook Book* assumes a reader who can buy them very fresh, which is the one condition the recipe bothers to state.