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Omelette, Cream Sauce
Break eight fresh eggs into a bowl, add half a gill milk, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes. Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, pour in the eggs, mix briskly for two minutes, let rest for half a minute; fold up the two opposite sides to meet in the centre, let rest for one minute. Turn on a hot dish, pour a hot cream sauce around the omelette and serve.
A plain French rolled omelette, written for a cook who already knows what a cream sauce is. Two details in the original need attention: the pepper and the pan time.
- Half a gill of milkAn American gill is 4 fl oz, so half is 2 fl oz (4 tablespoons); a British gill is 5 fl oz, giving 2½ fl oz (5 tablespoons). Either way it is a splash, not a custard base.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is generally reckoned at a quarter teaspoon, so two is about half a teaspoon of white pepper for eight eggs. That is assertive by modern taste; a quarter teaspoon may suit better.
- The butter is scantOne tablespoon for eight eggs will not carry a 10- to 12-inch pan. Two tablespoons, hot and foaming but not browned, gives the clean release the fold depends on.
- Two minutes of stirring is the outside limitMove the eggs briskly with the flat of a fork while shaking the pan, then stop while the top is still visibly wet. The residual heat during the half-minute rest sets it; carry on past that and the omelette turns dry and squeaky.
- The foldFolding two opposite sides to meet in the centre is the tri-fold, not the half-moon. Done in the pan, then tipped seam-side down onto the plate.
- Pan and heatA well-seasoned or nonstick 10- to 12-inch pan over medium-high. Eight eggs in a small pan will be thick, slow to set, and impossible to fold neatly — split into two omelettes of four eggs if your largest pan is 8 inches.
- The cream sauceThe book assumes its own recipe elsewhere; in this period that generally means a white sauce of butter, flour and milk or cream, seasoned, poured thin enough to run around the plate rather than blanket the omelette. Have it hot and finished before the eggs go in the pan, since the omelette will not wait.
- YieldEight eggs serves three as a main course, four at a larger meal.
The rolled omelette treated as a base for a sauce is a hotel-kitchen convention: the eggs are a neutral, quickly made platform, and the sauce poured around them is what names the dish. The same egg is served with tomato sauce, with mushrooms, with cheese, with fines herbes, which is why the instructions here are so bare. The International Cook Book is generally credited to Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it reads like a professional's shorthand: exact egg counts, timings to the half-minute, and the assumption that a cream sauce is already standing hot on the stove. The saltspoon measurement dates it as well — a specific small spoon in a Victorian and Edwardian table service, roughly a quarter teaspoon, that fell out of use once graduated measuring spoons became standard kitchen equipment.