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Omelette, Madeira Sauce
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add half a gill milk, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Sharply beat with fork two minutes. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, drop in the eggs, briskly mix with fork two minutes, let rest half a minute, fold up opposite sides to meet in centre, let rest one minute, then turn on a hot dish; pour a Madeira sauce over the omelette and serve.
A plain French rolled omelette, sized generously and dressed with a wine sauce that the book expects you to have on hand. The measurements need translating and the pan needs to be bigger than most people reach for.
- Half a gill of milkA gill is reckoned at 4 fl oz (1/2 cup) in American books and 5 fl oz in British ones, so half a gill is roughly 1/4 cup. That is a fairly wet omelette for eight eggs; 2 tablespoons gives a firmer fold if you prefer one.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is 1/2 teaspoon of pepper. That is assertive by modern taste — start with half of it and adjust.
- Pan size is the hingeEight eggs will not roll properly in a 20 cm pan; they steam into a thick pancake. Use a 30 cm (12-inch) nonstick or well-seasoned skillet, or divide the mixture and make two omelettes in a 25 cm pan.
- More butter than a tablespoonOne tablespoon barely films a 12-inch pan. Two tablespoons, foaming but not browning, over medium heat is closer to what the instruction intends.
- The two minutes of mixingThis is the stage that makes the texture: keep the fork moving through the eggs, pulling set curd from the edges inward, so you finish with fine curds still glossy on top. The half-minute rest sets the base into a sheet you can fold.
- DonenessThe one minute after folding is enough to firm the outside while the centre stays creamy, close to the French baveuse finish. If you want it fully set through, give it another minute over low heat rather than raising the temperature.
- Madeira sauceIn a book of this vintage this most likely means a brown sauce or demi-glace finished with Madeira and reduced, rather than a pan sauce made on the spot. A jarred or homemade demi-glace loosened with stock and 2–3 tablespoons of Madeira, simmered until it coats a spoon, stands in for it.
- YieldEight eggs serves four as a light main course, or six at a larger meal. Warm the serving dish, as the recipe specifies — the sauce chills fast on cold china.
The rolled, sauced omelette belongs to the professional French repertoire that dominated hotel and restaurant cooking in Europe and America around 1900. Madeira sauce is one of the standard brown-sauce derivatives of that system: a long-simmered espagnole or demi-glace, reduced and finished with fortified wine, held in the kitchen all service and ladled over whatever came to the pass. Madeira itself was a staple of nineteenth-century cellars because the heat-and-oxidation treatment the wine receives makes it nearly indestructible in bottle, a practical virtue when a cook needed a wine that would not spoil between uses. The instruction to beat sharply for two minutes and mix briskly for two more is the fingerprint of that trained line-cook approach: the omelette is a two-minute dish, and the labour has gone into the sauce.