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Omelette, Danoise
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill cream, teaspoon anchovy essence, three saltspoons salt, two saltspoons pepper, and sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes. Remove skin and bones from a two-ounce piece smoked salmon, cut in quarter-inch-square pieces, plunge into three pints boiling water, boil for five minutes and drain on a sieve. Prepare a cream sauce, add salmon to it with a tablespoon capers, mix well and keep hot till required. Thoroughly heat a tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, drop in the beaten eggs, briskly mix with fork for two minutes and let rest for half minute; fold up opposite sides to meet in centre, turn on a hot dish, pour prepared sauce over and serve.
A large, sauced omelette in the French style with Scandinavian trimmings. The one instruction to ignore is the five-minute boil for the salmon.
- Do not boil the salmonSmoked salmon dropped into three pints of boiling water for five minutes will turn dry and chalky, and much of its flavour goes into the water. The step probably made sense with a firmer, more heavily salted cure that wanted freshening; with modern cold-smoked salmon, cut it into quarter-inch dice and fold it into the hot sauce off the heat, where it needs no more than a minute to warm through.
- Half a gill of creamA gill is 5 imperial fluid ounces (about 142 ml), though an American gill is 4 fl oz, so half a gill is somewhere between about 60 and 70 ml -- call it 4 to 5 tablespoons. Either way that is a generous amount of liquid for eight eggs and will give a soft, loose curd rather than a firm one.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Three saltspoons of salt is about 3/4 teaspoon and two of pepper about 1/2 teaspoon. Cut the salt back to roughly half that: the anchovy essence, the smoked salmon and the capers are all salty, and the sauce is seasoned as well.
- Anchovy essenceA Victorian bottled staple, thinner and saltier than today's products. Substitute about half a teaspoon of anchovy paste, or a teaspoon of Asian fish sauce or Italian colatura, whisked into the cream before it goes to the eggs so it disperses.
- The cream sauceAssumed knowledge in this book. Make about a cup of thin bechamel — 1 tablespoon each butter and flour, a cup of milk or half milk and half cream, cooked out for a few minutes — and keep it just below a simmer. Once the salmon is in, do not let it boil.
- Pan and butterEight eggs need a 10- to 12-inch nonstick or well-seasoned pan over medium-high heat, and one tablespoon of butter is the bare minimum; two is safer. If your largest pan is 8 inches, make two omelettes of four eggs each rather than fighting one thick one.
- TimingTwo minutes of brisk stirring, half a minute of rest, then fold. The centre should still be visibly moist when it leaves the pan — the residual heat and the hot sauce finish it.
- YieldEight eggs plus sauce serves three as a main course or four at a lunch table. Serve immediately; a sauced omelette does not hold.
"Danoise" in the French kitchen vocabulary of the period is generally taken to signal the Scandinavian pantry — cured and smoked fish, capers, anchovy — much as "a la portugaise" is often said to have meant tomato and "a la milanaise" pasta and ham. Cookbooks of the 1900s leaned heavily on these French adjectives, so a dish labelled Danish here is really a Parisian omelette wearing a Danish garnish; smoked salmon and capers were the shorthand. The anchovy essence is the giveaway of the era: bottled fish seasonings were widely available, and a cook reaching for background savour then reached for a bottle rather than for stock or soy. The instruction to freshen the salmon in boiling water is also a period fingerprint, dating from when smoked salmon arrived as a stiff, salt-heavy side rather than the mild, sliceable cure sold today.