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Omelette, Piora
Carefully crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill cream, one ounce rich Swiss cheese in very small dice pieces, half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons white pepper and half a teaspoon French mustard. Sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes. Cut one ounce raw lean bacon into small dice pieces, and fry the bacon in a tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan five minutes, frequently tossing it meanwhile. Drop in the beaten eggs, mix with the fork for two minutes, let rest for a half minute; fold up opposite sides to meet in the centre, let rest for one minute, then turn on a hot dish and serve.
A large folded omelette in the Delmonico manner, built on eight eggs and finished in a single pan. Nothing here is obsolete, but the measures and the pepper need translating.
- Half a gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup (2 fl oz). Heavy or whipping cream is the right choice; anything lighter thins the eggs without enriching them.
- Three saltspoons of white pepperA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making this a full 3/4 teaspoon of ground white pepper for eight eggs. That is assertive by current taste; half of it is plenty unless you want the heat forward.
- French mustardRead this as smooth Dijon, not the bright yellow American condiment, which was not what the book meant and will make the eggs sweet and sour.
- Rich Swiss cheeseAn ounce of a firm alpine cheese — Gruyère, Emmental, or an aged Appenzeller. Cut it into genuinely small dice as directed; larger pieces sink and weep fat rather than melting through.
- Raw lean baconAn ounce is roughly one thick rasher. Unsmoked pancetta or a lean slab bacon is closest to what was meant; heavily smoked supermarket bacon will dominate the cheese.
- Five minutes of fryingWatch it rather than clocking it. The dice should be gold and rendered but still tender — five minutes over a hot pan can take them to hard and bitter, and the butter with them.
- Pan and heatEight eggs need a 10- to 12-inch non-stick or well-seasoned pan over medium heat. The two minutes of stirring should set curds without colouring the base; a browned omelette is a failed one in this style.
- YieldServes three as a main course, four at a mixed breakfast table. Warm the serving dish, as the recipe insists — a large omelette loses heat fast once folded.
Piora is a high alpine valley in the Swiss canton of Ticino, long known for its summer pasture dairying and the cheese made at its mountain huts; naming an omelette after it signalled Swiss cheese to a reader in much the same shorthand way that a la Florentine signalled spinach. The recipe sits in the wider grand-hotel and restaurant tradition of geographic garnish names, where a dish was catalogued less by method than by the one ingredient that identified it, and long strings of near-identical omelettes were distinguished by a place name on the menu card. The technique itself -- beaten eggs cooked hard and fast, stirred briefly, rested, then folded onto a hot plate -- is the standard French restaurant omelette of the period, and the instruction to fold "opposite sides to meet in the centre" describes the tri-fold still taught today rather than the rolled cigar shape.