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Omelette, Ivica
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill milk, season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper, and sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes. Heat a tablespoon oil in a frying pan, add one finely minced onion and fry for five minutes, adding then three red Spanish sweet peppers cut into small squares; toss all well and fry for three minutes. Drop in the beaten eggs, mix with the fork for two minutes and let rest a half minute; fold up the opposite sides to meet in the centre, let rest for one minute, turn upon a hot dish and serve.
For a special Good-Friday bill of fare
An eight-egg pepper-and-onion omelette, folded rather than rolled. The recipe is sound as written; most of what needs translating is the measurements and the peppers.
- Half a gill of milkA gill is half a cup, so this is about 1/4 cup for eight eggs. That is on the wet side by modern taste; 2 tablespoons gives a firmer fold.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is roughly 1/2 teaspoon. That is a lot of pepper for eight eggs; start with half and judge.
- Red Spanish sweet peppersThese are pimientos, thick-walled and mild; they were sold both fresh and jarred (roasted and peeled). Three of them will give roughly a cup, diced. Two fresh red bell peppers are the closest easily found substitute, but they will need longer than the three minutes given here to soften.
- Pan sizeEight eggs will not fold in a small pan. Use a 10- to 12-inch skillet, and add more oil or a knob of butter after the onion and pepper have fried, or the eggs will stick where the vegetables are not.
- The hinge: keep the eggs moving, then stopThe instruction to "mix with the fork for two minutes and let rest a half minute" is the whole technique. Stirring sets small curds; the rest welds them into a sheet you can fold. Once you fold, the residual heat finishes the interior, so pull the pan before the top looks dry.
- Heat levelModerate, not high. The pan has already fried onions for five minutes; let it cool slightly before the eggs go in, or the underside colours before the centre sets.
- YieldServes four as a main course, six as part of a larger meal. Serve it immediately on a warmed dish, as instructed, since an omelette this size cools fast.
Filippini's International Cook Book catalogues hundreds of dishes under personal names, place names and dedications, a habit inherited from the grand restaurant kitchens of the nineteenth century, where a garnish plus a name was how a repertoire was organised and sold. Ivica is a Croatian diminutive of Ivan, and the pairing of onion, sweet red pepper and egg fits comfortably into the Adriatic and Balkan kitchen, though the book does not say who the name honours. The closing line is the practical point: as a meatless dish built on eggs and vegetables, it qualified for a Good Friday menu, and cookbooks of this period are often said to have flagged which recipes could carry a fast day. Spanish pimientos appear here as a matter of course rather than as something exotic.