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Omelette, Napolitaine
Plunge an ounce of Italian macaroni in a pint boiling water with half teaspoon salt and boil for thirty-five minutes, drain on sieve, then cut them in quarter-inch pieces, drain them on cloth, then place in small saucepan with three saltspoons tomato sauce and teaspoon grated Parmesan cheese, season with saltspoon salt and half saltspoon pepper, mix well and cook for two minutes. Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add half gill milk, tablespoon Parmesan cheese, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper and sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes. Thoroughly heat a tablespoon melted butter in a black frying pan, drop in the eggs, sharply mix with fork for two minutes, let rest a half minute, spread the macaroni in the centre, fold up the two opposite sides to meet in the centre, let rest a minute, then turn on a hot dish, pour gill hot tomato sauce over and serve.
A folded French-style omelette with a macaroni and tomato filling, from the era when the pan mattered more than the timer. Two things in the original need adjusting: the pasta time and the pan.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon; a gill is half a cup, so half a gill of milk is 4 tablespoons. Three saltspoons of tomato sauce in the filling is only about three-quarters of a teaspoon, just enough to slick the macaroni without wetting the eggs.
- Thirty-five minutes is too longPeriod recipes routinely called for boiling pasta far longer than we now would. Cook current dried macaroni to just past al dente, roughly 9 to 11 minutes, or it will collapse into paste when you cut and reheat it.
- One ounce of macaroniThat is about a quarter cup dry, yielding a scant half cup cooked. It is a filling, not a casserole, and the proportion is deliberate: eight eggs to a small handful of pasta.
- The black frying panCast iron or carbon steel, well seasoned. A 10-inch nonstick or seasoned carbon steel pan does the same job for eight eggs; anything larger and the omelette will be too thin to fold.
- Butter and heatA single tablespoon is lean for eight eggs. Get the butter foaming but not browning before the eggs go in, and use two tablespoons if your pan is not reliably slick.
- The two minutes of stirringThis is the hinge. Sharp agitation with the fork for the first two minutes builds small curds and keeps the interior loose; the half-minute rest that follows sets the underside into a skin you can fold. Stop stirring while the top is still visibly wet.
- Folding two sides, not oneThe instruction to fold two opposite sides to meet in the centre gives a squared-off omelette rather than the rolled half-moon. Slide it seam-side down onto the hot dish.
- Tomato sauce to finishA gill, half a cup, of hot sauce poured over. A plain smooth tomato sauce is what is meant here, not a chunky ragu.
- YieldEight eggs serves three as a main course or four at a lighter meal. The book gives no yield; scale by halving to four eggs in an 8-inch pan for two.
The International Cook Book was the work of Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it reflects the restaurant kitchen's habit of tagging dishes with a place name to signal a treatment rather than a provenance. Napolitaine in this vocabulary means tomato and Parmesan, and by extension macaroni, the three things a New York dining room of the period associated with Naples. The pairing of pasta with eggs is genuinely southern Italian in spirit, though the household version there is usually a flat frittata of leftover spaghetti rather than this folded, French-technique omelette with sauce poured over. What you are looking at is an Italian idea passed through a French professional kitchen for an American table, which is very nearly the whole story of turn-of-the-century restaurant cooking in New York.