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Omelette Ecarlate
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill cream, half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons pepper. Place two gills tomato sauce in a frying pan and let reduce on the fire to three tablespoons, then add to the eggs and sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes. Cut two ounces cooked, smoked beef tongue in julienne strips, place in a frying pan with two tablespoons melted butter and fry for three minutes; then drop in the eggs and briskly mix with a fork for two minutes; let rest for half a minute, turn up the opposite sides to meet in centre, let rest for a minute, turn on a dish and serve.
A rolled French omelette in the grand-hotel manner, colored and flavored with reduced tomato and studded with cured tongue. The measurements are pre-metric American professional units, and one of them is worth checking before you reach for the pepper mill.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup: half a gill of cream is 4 tablespoons, and two gills of tomato sauce is 1 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is a scant teaspoon of pepper for eight eggs — assertive but plausible for the period; half that suits most palates now.
- Reduce the sauce first, and cool itOne cup of tomato sauce down to three tablespoons is a serious reduction — it should be thick and almost paste-like. Let it lose its steam before it goes into the eggs, or you begin scrambling them in the bowl.
- "Beef tongue" here means cured tongueThe dish depends on ready-cooked smoked or brined tongue, sold sliced at delis and some butchers. Two ounces cut in fine julienne is roughly a quarter to a third of a cup, depending how loosely it is piled; good pastrami or bresaola gives a similar salt-and-spice note if tongue is unavailable.
- Pan sizeEight eggs will not roll properly in a 10-inch pan. Use a 12-inch nonstick or well-seasoned steel skillet over medium-high heat, or divide the mixture and make two omelettes of four eggs each.
- Two minutes is the whole cooking timeTwo minutes is the active mixing time -- "Briskly mix with a fork" means keeping the curd moving until it sets into small soft flakes, then stopping while the surface is still glossy. The half-minute rest lets the base knit so the omelette will fold, and the recipe allows a further minute in the pan after folding; carrying it beyond that gives you a dry, rubbery roll.
- Folding and serving"Turn up the opposite sides to meet in centre" is the classic tri-fold, seam down on the plate. Eight eggs serves three as a main course or four at breakfast; serve at once, since a tomato-loosened omelette weeps as it stands.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon of salt plus cured tongue plus a concentrated tomato reduction adds up. Taste the reduced sauce before salting the eggs at all.
Écarlate is French for scarlet, and in classical kitchen language it points straight at langue écarlate — beef tongue brined with saltpetre, which turns the meat a deep red. Whether the name refers to the tongue, the tomato, or both, the effect intended is the same: bright red flecks and a blushing pink omelette on a white dish. Named omelettes ran into the dozens in the professional repertoire of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, each one a fixed garnish attached to a fixed name, and cookbooks of the sort that surveyed "the world's kitchen" for American households reproduced them as evidence of a well-traveled palate. The precision of the instructions here — timings in half-minutes, pepper measured in saltspoons — reads as the voice of the professional kitchen rather than the home cook.