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Omelette, Financiere
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add half a gill cream, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper, and sharply beat with fork for two minutes. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in frying pan, add three raw, well-cleaned chicken livers cut in halves and gently fry two minutes on each side. Add two tablespoons sherry, two gills demi-glace, half saltspoon cayenne, six small stoned olives, six canned mushrooms, six very thin slices truffles, three pickles cut in three-quarter-inch pieces, quarter teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, mix well and cook for six minutes, lightly stirring meanwhile. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in frying pan, drop in the beaten eggs, briskly mix with fork for two minutes and let rest half a minute, fold the two opposite sides to meet in centre and let rest one minute, turn on a hot dish, pour garnishing and sauce around omelette and serve.
A Delmonico-style filled omelette: a rich brown ragout of livers, truffles and olives spooned around a barely-set French omelette. The sauce is most of the work, so build it first and keep it warm.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is 4 fl oz, so half a gill of cream is 1/4 cup and two gills of demi-glace is 1 cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon: two saltspoons of white pepper is 1/2 teaspoon, and the cayenne is a scant 1/8 teaspoon.
- Demi-glaceIn professional kitchens of the period this was a standing preparation, reduced from brown stock and espagnole. A cup of good reduced brown veal or beef stock, thickened slightly, will stand in; commercial demi-glace concentrate works if you dilute it below the label strength, since a full cup of it will overwhelm the eggs with salt.
- Chicken liversTrim the greenish bile-stained spots and any connective tissue before halving. Two minutes a side plus six minutes in the sauce brings them through, which is what you want with poultry liver; they should be firm and grey-brown at the centre, not pink.
- The hinge is the eggEight eggs in one pan is a lot. Use a 10-11 inch nonstick or well-seasoned pan over medium-high heat, and treat "briskly mix with fork for two minutes" as closer to 45-60 seconds of stirring on a modern burner. Pull it while the surface is still glossy and moist; it finishes on the hot dish.
- Truffles and canned mushroomsCanned mushrooms were the standard garnish button of the period; small fresh cremini, sauteed separately, are better. Fresh truffle is a luxury purchase here, and truffle oil is not a substitute in a sauce this savoury. Sliced preserved truffle, or simply leaving it out, is honest.
- Pickles'pickles' here is almost certainly a small sour cucumber pickle, cornichon-style, rather than a sweet gherkin; sweet pickle would fight the sherry and the demi-glace.
- Order of workMake the garnish, hold it barely simmering off the heat, then cook the omelette in a second pan and plate immediately. Reheating the sauce hard after the olives and pickles go in dulls them.
- YieldServes three as a lunch dish, four at a stretch. If you want more, cook two four-egg omelettes rather than doubling the pan.
The name points to the classic French garniture à la financière, a garnish generally traced to the grand nineteenth-century repertoire and built on truffles, olives, mushrooms and organ meats bound in a Madeira or sherry-spiked demi-glace; the older versions also included cockscombs and cocks' kidneys, which this one quietly drops. The label is generally taken as a reference to expense, the sort of dish a financier could afford. Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, compiled The International Cook Book for American households, and pages like this one show the sort of larder he assumed: a pot of demi-glace already reduced, sherry, canned mushrooms and a tin of truffles. The omelette itself is almost incidental, a plain vehicle for a sauce that carries the prestige.