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Omelette Gibbons
Neatly trim a thick, white, medium cauliflower, plunge it in three quarts boiling water with a tablespoon salt and a gill milk, and boil forty-five minutes. Remove, thoroughly drain, then carefully press it through a wire sieve into a small pan, add half an ounce good butter, two egg yolks and one gill cream. Season with a half teaspoon salt, one saltspoon cayenne and a saltspoon grated nutmeg, sharply whisk while heating for six minutes, and shift pan on corner of range.
Crack eight fresh eggs into a bowl, add half gill milk, season with half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons white pepper, and sharply beat up with fork for two minutes. Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, drop in the eggs, mix with fork for two minutes, let rest half a minute, fold up opposite sides to meet in centre, let rest for quarter of a minute. Turn into a hot dish, pour cauliflower preparation and sprinkle a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese over all, set in brisk oven for five minutes, remove and serve.
A plain eight-egg omelette under a cauliflower purée, browned briefly with Parmesan. The old measures are the main obstacle; the technique is straightforward.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz), so half a gill is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon — the cayenne and nutmeg are 1/4 teaspoon each, the white pepper 3/4 teaspoon, which is assertive but deliberate.
- The hinge: the purée is a custardOnce the yolks and cream go in, the cauliflower mixture should be whisked over gentle heat and not allowed to boil, or the yolks scramble and the sauce turns grainy. The recipe gives six minutes but no heat level; keep it low. The pan then goes to "the corner of the range," meaning off the direct heat to stay warm.
- Boiling timeForty-five minutes is far longer than a cauliflower needs, but the head is being pressed through a sieve, so overcooking is not the fault it would be otherwise. Fifteen to twenty minutes gives a head soft enough to purée with cleaner flavour and less sulphur.
- Milk in the waterThe gill of milk added to the cooking water is a period trick for keeping cauliflower white rather than grey. A squeeze of lemon does the same job.
- Sieve or blenderPressing through a wire sieve gives a smooth, dryish purée. A food processor is faster but holds more water — drain the cauliflower hard and let it steam dry in the hot pan for a minute before puréeing, or the sauce will slacken.
- Brisk ovenBrisk is roughly 400-450F; period oven terms are approximate. Five minutes at that heat is enough to glaze the Parmesan; the omelette is already cooked and will toughen if left longer. A broiler for two minutes does the same thing with less risk.
- The omelette itselfEight eggs want a large pan, and the fold described here brings opposite sides to meet in the centre rather than making a half-moon. Pull it while the interior is still visibly moist, since it finishes in the oven.
- YieldEnough for about four as a lunch or supper dish, though the recipe gives no yield. It does not hold; the sauce skins and the eggs weep within a few minutes of leaving the oven.
The International Cook Book (1906) was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is full of dishes carrying surnames — omelettes, sauces and garnishes named for patrons, colleagues and public figures of the day. Who Gibbons was is not recorded in the book, and the name attaches to nothing in the dish itself; the practice was simply the restaurant convention of the period, in which a regular customer or a notable guest might be honoured by having a dish named after them. What is genuinely of its time is the construction: a plain omelette treated as a base for a rich vegetable purée bound with yolks and cream, then gratinéed. The sieve-and-cream treatment turned the cauliflower into something closer to a sauce than a side.