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Omelette, Mornay
Prepare a plain omelette turn it into a hot dish; pour a Mornay sauce over it; sprinkle with a tablespoon grated-Parmesan cheese, set in the oven to brown for five minutes; remove and serve.
A two-line assembly recipe that assumes you already have a Mornay sauce standing ready, which is how a professional kitchen of the period worked. The only real difficulty is keeping the eggs from overcooking under the browning heat.
- The hinge: keep the omelette softRoll the omelette while the centre is still visibly loose, since it will take a further five minutes of oven heat under the sauce. An omelette cooked through before saucing comes out of the oven dry and squeaky.
- What Mornay sauce isA béchamel finished with grated cheese, classically Gruyère with Parmesan, sometimes enriched with an egg yolk. For one omelette you need only about half a cup, thick enough to coat rather than run off.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature. "Set in the oven to brown" implies a hot oven, or in a modern kitchen a broiler close to the element; a moderate oven is unlikely to colour the sauce before the eggs toughen.
- Five minutes is a maximumUnder a broiler the surface will spot and blister in two to three minutes. Watch it rather than trusting the clock; the dish and sauce are already hot going in.
- "A hot dish"A shallow gratin dish or metal-handled skillet, warmed first. A cold platter chills the underside of the omelette and the sauce sets before it browns.
- ParmesanGrate it yourself from a wedge. Pre-grated Parmesan is drier and commonly carries an anti-caking agent, which can keep it from melting smoothly into the sauce.
- YieldA three-egg omelette treated this way serves one as a lunch or supper dish, two if it is one course among several.
Mornay sauce is one of the standard bechamel derivatives codified in nineteenth-century French professional cooking, and its name is traditionally linked to the Mornay family, though the attribution is repeated far more often than it is documented. What matters more is the structure it implies: a kitchen with bechamel already on hand, so that a garnished omelette could be produced in the minutes between two orders. Recipes of this kind were printed in shorthand because they were addressed to readers expected to know the mother sauces. The result is a dish that reads as three lines and cooks as two separate preparations.