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Omelette Jardiniere
Place in a small frying pan two tablespoons cooked green peas with two tablespoons canned string beans, cut into very small pieces, and one tablespoon canned asparagus tips; add one tablespoon butter. Season with three saltspoons salt and one saltspoon white pepper and let cook on the range for five minutes. Dredge over a teaspoon flour, toss a little, add half gill milk and half gill cream, also a few little bits of butter; mix well and let cook for five minutes.
Prepare an omelette, and just before folding up spread half the prepared vegetables over the omelette; fold up both sides, let rest, turn out upon a hot dish, arrange the balance of the vegetables around the dish and serve.
A plain French vegetable omelette, filled and garnished with a creamed jardinière. The only real difficulties are the old measures and the fact that the vegetable mixture is already cooked before it goes near the pan.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Three saltspoons is about ¾ teaspoon salt, which is generous for two tablespoons each of peas and beans — start with half that and correct at the end.
- GillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is ¼ cup. The sauce is ¼ cup milk plus ¼ cup cream thickened with one teaspoon flour, which gives a loose, pourable cream rather than a thick binding sauce.
- "On the range"Simply means over direct heat on the stovetop. Keep it low: the vegetables are all pre-cooked and the point of the five minutes is to warm them through and let them take up the butter, not to soften them further.
- Canned vegetablesCanned string beans and asparagus tips were a standard out-of-season option when this was written and are already fully soft. If you use fresh or frozen, blanch them first, then cut the beans small as directed — large pieces make the omelette harder to fold cleanly.
- Drain wellCanning liquid is the main risk to the filling. Drain the beans and asparagus thoroughly and pat them dry, or the teaspoon of flour will have far more liquid than it can carry and the sauce will run out of the omelette.
- The omelette itselfThe recipe assumes the cook already knows how to make a plain omelette and only specifies the fold: filling spread over it, then both sides folded up. Fill and fold while the surface is still moist; a fully dry omelette cracks along the fold.
- "Let rest"A brief pause seam-side down in the pan off the heat. It sets the fold so the omelette turns out in one piece.
- YieldAs written this serves one generously or two modestly. The vegetable mixture scales cleanly if you are making omelettes in succession — cook it once in a larger pan and keep it warm.
Jardinière — the feminine of jardinier, and in cookery something like "in the gardener's manner" — is the standard French kitchen term for a garnish of vegetables cut small and finished in butter or cream, and it attaches to everything from braised beef to this omelette. What dates the recipe is not the name but the shopping list: canned string beans and canned asparagus tips, called for without apology alongside cooked green peas. By the time this book appeared, commercial canning had made a spring garnish available in February to any household with a grocer. A buttered, creamed vegetable omelette was exactly the sort of thing meant to stand in for French home cooking — quick, thrifty with its two tablespoons of this and one of that, and built on the assumption that the cook could already fold up an omelette without being told how.