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Omelette Creole
Heat in a small saucepan a tablespoon oil; add one finely minced white onion and a finely minced green pepper and gently cook for six minutes, lightly stirring meanwhile. Then add three medium, peeled and crushed ripe tomatoes, also three finely minced canned mushrooms. Season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons sugar and one saltspoon white pepper. Mix lightly, then let simmer on the range for thirty minutes. Finely chop together half bean sound garlic with a branch of parsley and a branch of chervil and add to the pan, lightly mix and let cook for five minutes longer. Add one teaspoon fresh bread crumbs; mix a little and keep on the corner of the range. Meanwhile carefully crack eight fresh eggs into a bowl, add half gill milk, half teaspoon salt and a saltspoon white pepper. Sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes. Heat a tablespoon butter in a large and very clean black frying pan. Pour in the eggs, briskly stir all over with a fork for two minutes; let rest for half a minute. Pour into the centre of the omelette half the Creole preparation, fold both ends up, let rest for a minute. Then turn it into a hot dish, arrange the balance of the Creole around the omelette and serve.
A folded omelette with a cooked Creole sauce, half inside and half spooned around it. The recipe is workable as written once a few kitchen terms from the period are translated.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of sugar is half a teaspoon and a saltspoon of white pepper is a generous pinch. A gill is half a cup, making the half gill of milk in the eggs about 1/4 cup.
- "Half bean sound garlic"Most likely a piece of firm, sound garlic about the size of a bean, roughly half a small clove, though the book does not explain the phrase. It is added near the end and cooks only five minutes more.
- The corner of the rangeOn a coal range the corner was the coolest spot, used for holding things warm without further cooking. Modern equivalent: lowest burner setting, or off the heat with a lid on. The sauce should be warm, not hot, when it meets the eggs.
- Sauce first, alwaysThe thirty-minute simmer is the hinge. The tomatoes must cook down to a thick, spoonable mass with no free liquid, or the omelette will weep and tear when folded. Have the sauce finished and resting before a single egg is broken.
- The teaspoon of bread crumbsProbably intended to take up any last moisture in the sauce rather than to season it, though the recipe does not say. If your tomatoes were watery, a little more is legitimate; if the sauce is already thick, skip it.
- Canned mushroomsA common pantry item in the period, and saltier and softer than fresh. Fresh cremini or button mushrooms work, but saute them separately until their water has gone before they join the pan, or they will thin the sauce.
- ChervilRarely stocked now. Flat-leaf parsley with a few tarragon leaves gives the closest approximation of its faint anise note; plain parsley alone is an acceptable loss.
- The black frying panA well-seasoned carbon steel or cast iron pan, scrupulously clean. Eight eggs need a 10- to 12-inch pan; in anything smaller the omelette sets too thick to fold. A tablespoon of butter is the minimum — more will not hurt.
- Timing the eggsTwo minutes of brisk stirring and thirty seconds of rest is right for a French-style omelette: set underneath, still creamy on top. It will carry on cooking off the heat, so err on the soft side before filling.
- YieldEight eggs and three tomatoes serve four as a lunch or supper dish, two if it is the whole meal.
The "Creole" of this omelette is the tomato-onion-pepper base that runs through New Orleans cooking, and the recipe reads like a French kitchen's adoption of it: the sauce is built and reduced much the way a chef would build a fondue de tomates, then folded into an otherwise classic French omelette and served with the balance spooned around the dish. Alexander Filippini, whose long career at Delmonico's shaped his compendia, wrote for exactly that kind of hybrid table -- American ingredients handled by French method. The sauce gets far more detailed instruction than the omelette itself, which is dispatched in three lines.