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Omelette Provencale
Finely slice three medium, peeled and well-cleaned fresh mushrooms; place in a saucepan with a teaspoon good butter and cook for five minutes. Add a peeled, red, sound tomato, cut into small pieces. Season with three saltspoons salt and one saltspoon white pepper. Mix a little and let cook for five minutes. Finely chop together a half bean sound garlic and two branches freshly washed and dried parsley and add to the pan; lightly mix and cook for five minutes longer. Carefully crack eight fresh eggs into a bowl, add half gill milk, season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes. Heat a tablespoon of butter in a black frying pan, drop in the eggs, mix well with a fork for a half minute, then pour in the preparation; mix for a minute with the fork, let rest for one minute; fold up the two opposite sides, let rest for a minute more, turn out on a hot dish and serve.
A straightforward filled omelette, held back only by its 1900s measuring vocabulary. The filling is a persillade-tomato garnish cooked down separately, then folded through the eggs at the last moment.
- Saltspoons and gillsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three is 3/4 teaspoon and one is 1/4 teaspoon. Half a gill is 1/4 cup of milk (2 1/2 tablespoons more if the book is using the British 5-ounce gill) for eight eggs, which is on the generous side; 2 tablespoons gives a firmer set.
- "Half bean" of garlicA bean here means a clove. Half a clove for eight eggs is restrained by modern Provençal standards, and a whole clove will not overwhelm the dish.
- The black frying panCarbon steel or well-seasoned cast iron, 10 to 12 inches for this quantity. The point is a slick, evenly hot surface; a nonstick pan of the same size does the same job.
- Drain the fillingMushrooms and tomato throw a lot of liquid over fifteen minutes of cooking. Cook it until the pan is nearly dry before it goes near the eggs, or the omelette will weep and refuse to fold.
- Heat managementThe recipe gives no heat level. Medium is right: the eggs should set in roughly two to three minutes total, and the stirring in the first half minute is what builds curd rather than a flat sheet.
- Total timeThe three five-minute stages exist so each ingredient softens in turn, but fifteen minutes leaves the mushrooms grey. Eight to ten minutes altogether, with the garlic and parsley in for the last minute only, keeps the flavours distinct.
- YieldEight eggs serves four as a main course or six as a first course. If your pan is smaller than 10 inches, make two omelettes of four eggs rather than one thick one.
Anything labelled provençale in a turn-of-the-century professional kitchen meant the same trio: tomato, garlic and parsley, the last two chopped together into what French cooks call a persillade. The formula is generally traced to French restaurant practice, where it was applied indiscriminately to eggs, chicken, fish and potatoes, so that the name described a garnish rather than a regional dish as such. Its appearance in an English-language international collection reflects how thoroughly French terminology governed American hotel and club cooking of the period.