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Omelette, Tiflis
Carefully crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add half gill milk, two tablespoons Russian caviar and two saltspoons each slat and white pepper. Sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes. Heat one tablespoons butter in a frying pan, drop in the eggs, stir with a fork for two minutes, let rest for a minute; fold up the opposite sides to join in the centre, let rest for half a minute, then turn upon a hot dish and serve.
A large, plainly built omelette whose only real complication is the caviar, which is expensive and easily ruined by heat. Read the salt note before you season.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of milk is 4 tablespoons — a generous but workable amount for eight eggs. Any more and the omelette weeps.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the recipe calls for half a teaspoon each of salt and white pepper.
- Salt and caviarCaviar carries a great deal of salt of its own, and two tablespoons of it plus half a teaspoon of added salt will read as very salty to a modern palate. Season with a pinch, taste the cooked edge, and adjust.
- When to add the caviarBeaten into the raw eggs, as written, the roe cooks through and loses its colour and texture. Cooks today often stir the caviar in off the heat, or spoon it down the centre before folding, so the grains stay whole and cool.
- Pan sizeEight eggs need a 10- to 12-inch pan to set in the two minutes given. In a smaller pan the centre will still be liquid at the fold.
- Heat and butterOne tablespoon of butter is thin coverage for a pan that size unless it is well seasoned or non-stick; two is safer. Keep the heat at medium — a browned surface fights the caviar.
- "Let rest for a minute"This is the standard French folded-omelette method: stir until curds form, then stop stirring and let the base set into a sheet you can fold. The finished centre should be barely set, not dry.
- YieldEight eggs serve four as a main course or six at a breakfast table. Serve at once; a caviar omelette held warm goes flat and fishy.
Tiflis is the old name for Tbilisi, capital of Georgia and, when this book was compiled, the administrative seat of Russian rule in the Caucasus — a city Western travellers associated with the meeting of Russian and Persian tables. The name here seems to function less as a claim of Georgian origin than as a signal of caviar, since sturgeon roe from the Caspian reached Europe and America through Russian channels and was priced accordingly. Filippini's International Cook Book collects many such geographically named preparations, most of them French technique dressed in a foreign garnish, and this omelette is a clear case: the folding method is straight out of the Paris kitchen, and only the caviar is imported. That caviar was a luxury but not yet a rarity — Caspian fisheries still supplied it in quantity, which is why a cookbook could call for two tablespoons in a breakfast dish without comment.