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Omelette, Florentine
Remove stalks, thoroughly wash and drain a pint fresh spinach, plunge into a quart boiling water with a teaspoon salt, boil for ten minutes, drain, press out all the water and finely chop on a board. Place in a sautoire with three saltspoons each salt and sugar, one saltspoon pepper and briskly stir on fire for four minutes, or until dry, then place in a bowl. Crack in eight fresh eggs, add a half gill cream, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper, and sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes. Thoroughly heat two tablespoons melted butter in a black frying pan, drop in preparation, briskly stir with a fork for two minutes and let rest for half a minute; fold up opposite sides to meet in centre and let rest for a minute, turn on a hot dish and serve.
A flat-folded French omelette with a dry spinach base. The hinge is the spinach: it must be squeezed and dried hard, or the eggs will weep in the pan.
- Saltspoons and gillsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons is 3/4 teaspoon. A gill is half a cup, making the half gill of cream 1/4 cup.
- A pint of spinachThis is a loose volume measure of raw leaves, not a weight, and it is genuinely imprecise. Depending on how tightly the leaves are packed it could stand for anywhere from a couple of ounces to several ounces of untrimmed spinach, and whatever the quantity it cooks down to the small amount of dry chopped spinach the recipe wants.
- Boiling timeTen minutes in salted water was standard when spinach came in coarse, mature bunches. Modern bagged or bunched leaf spinach is tender enough to be done in one to two minutes; boil it the full ten and you lose both colour and flavour.
- Squeeze it dry, twicePress the water out by hand or in a towel, then use the four minutes of brisk stirring in the pan to drive off the rest. Wet spinach is the one thing that will ruin the omelette.
- SautoireA shallow straight-sided sauté pan. Any wide skillet does the job, since it is only being used to dry the spinach.
- Total saltThere is salt in the boiling water, 3/4 teaspoon with the spinach and another 1/2 teaspoon with the eggs. Taste the spinach before adding the second lot; modern palates will usually want less.
- The black frying panA well-seasoned carbon steel or cast iron pan, which is still the right choice. Get it properly hot before the butter goes in, then work over brisk heat so the two minutes of stirring sets the curd without browning it.
- YieldEight eggs makes one large omelette serving three or four. If your pan is under 10 inches, do it in two batches rather than crowding it.
"Florentine" on a menu is shorthand for spinach, a convention of French professional cookery that survives in eggs Florentine and fish Florentine. The association is traditionally traced to Catherine de' Medici, who is said to have brought Florentine cooks and a taste for spinach to the French court in the sixteenth century; the story is repeated everywhere but rests on very little documentary evidence, and the term itself only becomes fixed in kitchen French much later. The vocabulary here — saltspoons, gills, the sautoire, the instruction to use a black frying pan — places the recipe squarely in the professional hotel and restaurant tradition of the turn of the twentieth century, where volume measures for eggs and cream were quicker to call out than weights, and where a cook was assumed to know that an omelette is folded in the pan and turned out, never flipped like a pancake.