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Omelette with Anchovies
Cut twelve oil anchovies into quarter-inch even pieces and place in a bowl. Carefully crack eight fresh eggs into the same bowl, add half gill cold milk and season with two saltspoons salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes.
Heat one tablespoon butter in a black frying pan, drop in the eggs and mix with a fork for two minutes; let rest for half a minute longer; turn it on a hot dish and serve.
A plain French-style omelette with tinned anchovy stirred through the raw egg. The whole thing takes about four minutes at the stove, so measure and cut before the pan goes on.
- Half a gill of milkA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons — 1/4 cup for eight eggs. That is a fairly wet omelette by modern French standards; 2 tablespoons gives a firmer curd if you prefer it.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon each of salt and white pepper. With twelve anchovy fillets already in the bowl, cut the salt to a pinch or leave it out and taste at the end.
- Oil anchoviesThese are the cured fillets packed in oil, sold in flat tins. Drain them well and blot on paper before cutting, or the oil slicks the eggs. Twelve fillets is roughly one standard 2 oz tin.
- A black frying panCarbon steel or well-seasoned cast iron, 10 to 12 inches for eight eggs. A crowded pan steams the eggs instead of setting them; if your largest is 8 inches, cook in two batches.
- One tablespoon of butterSparse for a pan that size. Use two, and let the foam subside before the eggs go in — the butter should smell nutty but not brown.
- Mix with a fork for two minutesThis is the hinge. Keep the fork moving through the eggs over medium heat so you build small soft curds rather than a set sheet, then stop while the surface is still visibly moist. The half-minute rest off the heat finishes it; carryover cooking does the rest on the hot dish.
- Turning it out'Turn it on a hot dish' most likely means rolling or folding the omelette onto the platter rather than flipping it, though the book does not spell this out. Tilt the pan away from you, fold the near edge over with the fork, and let it roll out seam-side down.
- YieldEight eggs serves four as a light main course or six at a larger breakfast. Warm the serving dish; a cold plate flattens the texture immediately.
Anchovy was one of the standard savoury seasonings of the Anglo-French kitchen well into the twentieth century, appearing as paste, essence, butter and whole cured fillet, and it did much of the work that Worcestershire sauce or soy does in a modern pantry. Filippini's book treats the plain omelette as a template with a long list of interchangeable additions — herbs, cheese, kidney, croutons, anchovy — rather than as a dish in its own right. The instruction to use a "black frying pan" distinguishes an iron or steel pan from the tinned copper otherwise common in professional kitchens of the period.