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Omelette, Soubise
Heat one and a half tablespoons butter in a saucepan, add one finely minced white onion and lightly brown for five minutes; dredge in two tablespoons flour, stir while heating for one minute, then pour in one gill milk and a gill cream, constantly mixing until it comes to a boil; cook for five minutes. Dilute an egg yolk with a tablespoon cream and add to the sauce, mix well and keep hot. Prepare a plain omelette, turn on a baking dish, pour the sauce and sprinkle a tablespoon of grated Parmesan cheese over; place in a brisk oven for five minutes, remove and serve.
A plain omelette finished with onion b e9chamel and browned briefly in a hot oven. The original assumes you know how to build an omelette and how hot a "brisk" oven runs; both need stating.
- A gill is half a cupOne gill milk and one gill cream means 1/2 cup each, a cup of liquid total. With two tablespoons of flour that gives a sauce thick enough to coat rather than pour.
- Brisk ovenRead that as roughly 400-450F. The dish is only in for five minutes; it is there to glaze the Parmesan, not to cook anything through.
- The yolk liaison must not boilOnce the diluted yolk goes in, hold the sauce below a simmer. Bring it back to the boil and the yolk scrambles into threads, which no amount of whisking will smooth out.
- "Lightly brown" is generousA soubise is meant to taste sweet and mild. Sweat the onion in the butter until translucent and barely golden; real browning brings a bitterness that fights the cream.
- Strain if you want the classic textureThe recipe leaves the minced onion in the sauce. Traditional soubise is sieved or blended smooth. Either is defensible, but a rough mince left whole reads as rustic rather than refined.
- Onion quantityA large modern onion will overwhelm a cup of sauce; use a small one, or half a large one.
- Omelette sizeNo egg count is given. Three eggs is a reasonable proportion for this quantity of sauce and serves one generously or two modestly. Keep the omelette soft in the centre, since it gets five more minutes of oven heat.
- Baking dishUse a shallow gratin dish or an ovenproof plate barely larger than the omelette. In a deep dish the sauce pools away from the eggs and never glazes.
Sauce Soubise — onion cooked down in béchamel or with rice until sweet and pale — is generally traced to the household of the Princes de Soubise in eighteenth-century France, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented and the sauce almost certainly predates whoever gave it the name. By the time this book was compiled it had long since become standard restaurant vocabulary: Escoffier codified it, and cooks used it on eggs, mutton, veal and vegetables alike. Its appearance here as an omelette garnish reflects how international hotel kitchens of the period worked, with a small repertoire of mother sauces recombined endlessly over simple base preparations. The glaze of Parmesan and a fast turn in the oven is the standard finish for anything called gratin, and it does more work than it looks: five minutes of top heat is what turns a sauced omelette from something spooned over into something baked together.