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Omelette Paloise
Rub lightly interior of a bowl with half bean sound garlic, then break in eight fresh eggs, add a half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, half gill cream, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper, and sharply beat with fork for two minutes. Plunge a sound green pepper in boiling water for two minutes, take up and skin with a coarse towel, seed and cut it in small square pieces. Place in a frying pan with an ounce raw lean ham cut in small squares and a tablespoon melted butter, then fry for five minutes, tossing once in a while. Drop in eggs, briskly stir with fork for two minutes and let rest for a half minute; fold up opposite sides to meet in centre and let rest for a minute, turn on a hot dish and serve.
A rolled French omelette with a Basque-Béarnais filling, written for a cook who already knows the fold. The measurements are the part that needs translating.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of cream is 1/4 cup (60 ml). That is generous for eight eggs and will give a soft, slightly loose curd rather than a firm one.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is 1/2 teaspoon of pepper. Against half a teaspoon of salt that is a distinctly peppery omelette; scale it back if your pepper is freshly ground and pungent.
- "Half bean sound garlic"A "bean" of garlic in books of this period is usually a clove, so this is most likely half a clove; it can also be read as a piece about the size of half a bean. Either way it is rubbed round the bowl and then discarded — a scent, not an ingredient.
- Skinning the pepperTwo minutes in boiling water loosens the skin enough to rub off with a coarse cloth. A modern cook gets a better result blistering the pepper directly over a flame or under the broiler, which also concentrates the flavour rather than diluting it.
- The hamThe recipe specifies only "raw lean ham," that is, uncooked rather than boiled or wet-cured sandwich ham; given the dish's region an air-dried ham of the Bayonne type is a reasonable reading. Prosciutto or serrano is the closest supermarket substitute; it needs only enough heat to release its fat.
- Pan and heatEight eggs want a 10- to 12-inch pan, and the butter and ham fat should be hot but not browning when the eggs go in. Two minutes of brisk stirring, half a minute of rest to set the base, then the fold is exactly right for a French omelette that is still creamy inside.
- YieldEight eggs serve three to four as a main course. If your pan is smaller, make two omelettes of four eggs rather than crowding one.
The tag paloise means "of Pau," the capital of Béarn; in classical kitchen French it signals a dish of that region — most familiarly the mint-scented variant of béarnaise sauce. Here it points instead to the Béarnais and Basque habit of cooking eggs with sweet peppers and cured mountain ham, the same combination that underlies pipérade and the omelettes served all along the Pyrenean foothills. The recipe comes from Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, whose International Cook Book gathered several hundred regional and foreign dishes into a single alphabetical run for American households; its French entries are written in the compressed, timed style of a professional kitchen, where a cook is told how many minutes to stir but never how large a pan to use.