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Omelette, Montenegro
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add half gill cream or milk, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper, and sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes. Peel a small cucumber, cut it in half, scoop out the spongy part, then slice very fine; plunge the slices in a pint boiling water with half teaspoon salt and boil for three minutes, drain on a sieve, then place on a cloth until completely dry. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a black frying pan, add one ounce raw ham cut in very small dice pieces and the cucumbers, toss well and fry briskly six minutes, occasionally tossing meanwhile; drop in the eggs with a half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, stir with fork for two minutes and let rest for half a minute; fold opposite sides to meet at centre, let rest for a minute, turn on a hot flat dish and serve immediately.
A large folded omelette built around blanched cucumber, which behaves rather like a mild summer squash once the seeds are out and the water is driven off. The whole thing turns on that drying step.
- Dry the cucumber properlyCucumber is mostly water, and any left in the slices will weep into the eggs and slacken the omelette. After the three-minute boil, drain, spread on a towel and blot until the surface is genuinely dry to the touch — the six minutes in the pan should be browning, not steaming.
- Half a gillA gill is a quarter pint, so half a gill is 1/4 cup (about 60 ml) of cream or milk.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of pepper is half a teaspoon — assertive but in keeping with the ham.
- Raw hamThis means uncooked cured ham rather than boiled ham: prosciutto or a similar dry-cured country ham, diced small. It is fried here, so the cure does the flavouring rather than the cooking.
- The black frying panCarbon steel or well-seasoned cast iron, preheated. For eight eggs you want a 10- to 12-inch pan; anything smaller gives a thick, slow-setting omelette that will overcook at the base before the centre sets.
- Two minutes of stirringStir and shake continuously while the curds form, then stop and let it sit the half minute so the underside knits into a skin you can fold against. Skipping the rest is how the fold tears.
- YieldEight eggs serves three to four as a main course, or six as part of a larger meal. The recipe has it turned out whole onto a hot flat dish and served at once.
The International Cook Book (1906) was assembled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and belongs to a genre of turn-of-the-century professional cookbooks that attached national and place names to dishes fairly loosely — a garnish or a technique was enough to earn a title. Montenegro was an independent principality in these years, newly fashionable in the Western press through Balkan politics and royal marriages, and the name here signals southeastern Europe more than it records any Montenegrin kitchen practice. The dish pairs cured pork with cooked cucumber, a combination said to be found across central and eastern Europe, where cucumbers were braised, stewed and stuffed as well as pickled or eaten raw.