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Omelette Soufflee with Apples
Place three tablespoons powdered sugar in a bowl with six egg yolks, three tablespoons flour, a half saltspoon salt, half teaspoon vanilla essence, and sharply beat up with a wooden spoon for five minutes. Whisk up a gill cream to a stiff froth, add to yolks and gently mix with a wooden spoon. Now beat the whites of six eggs to a froth, add to mixture and lightly mix with skimmer. Cut three sound apples into quarters, peel, remove cores, finely slice and place them in a frying pan with a half ounce butter. Sprinkle a little sugar over and cook on brisk fire for five minutes, tossing them meanwhile. Add two tablespoons currant jelly, carefully mix without mashing the apples, and keep hot. Heat two tablespoons clarified butter in a large frying pan, drop in preparation, cook for two minutes, then set pan in oven for six minutes or till firm. Remove, glide omelette on a piece of white paper, turn it again into pan and cook for one minute more. Glide it again on the paper, arrange apples in centre, roll it up in omelette shape, dress on a hot dish, sprinkle a little powdered sugar over and serve.
This is a sweet soufflé omelet — a batter of yolks, flour, whipped cream and beaten whites, started on the stove and finished in the oven, then filled with buttered apples. It moves fast at the end, so have the apples cooked and the plates hot before the whites go in.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz) of cream. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, so half a saltspoon is a scant 1/8 teaspoon of salt.
- Powdered sugarIn 1906 "powdered sugar" means finely milled granulated sugar — modern caster or superfine. Today's confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch; it will work in the batter but is best avoided in the pan with the apples, where it can taste chalky.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderately hot oven, somewhere around 375-400F, is a reasonable modern reading, judged against the recipe's own test: six minutes, or till firm.
- The hinge: fold, do not beatThe whipped cream and the whites are what lift this. Beat the yolk-flour base hard, then fold both in with a light hand — the original's "skimmer" is a flat perforated spoon, and a rubber spatula does the same job. Overmixing at this stage gives you a flat, eggy pancake.
- Whites to a frothTake them to soft, barely-drooping peaks, not stiff and dry. Stiff whites will not fold into a flour-thickened base without breaking down.
- The paper manoeuvreSliding the omelet onto paper and returning it to the pan is a period way of colouring the second side without tearing it. If the top has already set and taken a little colour in the oven, skip it and go straight to filling and rolling.
- Pan sizeThe recipe asks only for a large ovenproof frying pan; something in the 10- to 12-inch range suits this quantity. In a smaller pan the batter sits deeper and will likely need longer than the six minutes stated.
- Apples and jellyChoose a firm cooking apple that holds its shape — Braeburn, Golden Delicious, Granny Smith. 'Currant jelly' here most likely means red currant. Mix it in gently, as the recipe insists, so the slices stay whole.
- Yield and timingSix eggs feeds four as a dessert. It must go to the table the moment it is rolled and sugared; like any soufflé it begins to sink within a few minutes.
Alessandro Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book reflects that training: a French professional repertoire written out in short, unbroken paragraphs for an American household audience. The omelette soufflée was a standard nineteenth-century restaurant dessert — eggs separated, the whites beaten and folded back, the whole thing puffed in a pan and finished in the oven, sitting somewhere between an omelet and a soufflé. Pairing it with apples sautéed in butter and bound with red currant jelly is thoroughly of its moment; currant jelly was the all-purpose glazing and finishing preserve of the period, used on fruit tarts, roast game and desserts alike, and served here to gloss the apples rather than sweeten them much. The instruction to slide the omelet onto "a piece of white paper" is a reminder of how much professional cooking then relied on paper as a tool, for lining, for turning delicate things, and for shielding them from a fire whose heat could not be dialled down.