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Omelette, with Asparagus
Drop half pint canned asparagus tips in boiling water for two minutes. Drain well and place in a small frying pan with a taplespoon melted butter. Season with half teaspoon salt and a saltspoon white pepper. Toss them well and cook for three minutes.
Prepare a plain omelette and just before folding it up place half the asparagus in the centre of the omelette, well spread over. Fold up, dress on a hot dish, arrange the other half of the asparagus around the omelette and serve.
A straightforward filled omelette from the era when canned asparagus tips were a pantry staple and every cookbook assumed you already knew the plain omelette that this one builds on. Two measures need translating, and the heat matters more than the timings.
- Half pint of asparagusHalf of asparagus -- Half a pint is one cup, which is roughly the drained contents of a small can of tips; can sizes vary, so measure rather than assume. If you use fresh tips instead, skip the two-minute refresh and blanch them for two to three minutes until just tender, then proceed to the butter pan.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Half a teaspoon of salt for a cup of canned asparagus is generous, since canning brine is already salted; taste the tips before adding all of it.
- Why boil canned asparagus at allThe two minutes in boiling water most likely serves to rinse off the tinny brine and heat the tips through rather than to cook them further. Canned tips are already cooked and fragile, so lift them out rather than dumping them into a colander, and be gentle when tossing them in butter.
- The plain omelette it assumesThe recipe gives no details at all for the plain omelette it builds on. A workable modern version: three eggs beaten with a pinch of salt, cooked in a tablespoon of butter in an 8-inch pan over medium-high heat, keeping the eggs moving until set but still glossy and slightly loose on top, then fill and fold. The residual heat finishes the centre.
- Have the filling ready firstThis is the hinge. The asparagus must be buttered, seasoned and hot before the eggs go into the pan, because an omelette gives you about ninety seconds of working time and will turn leathery if it waits.
- Dress on a hot dishWarm the serving plate. A cold plate chills a thin omelette almost immediately and the buttered asparagus arranged around it will congeal.
- YieldOne generous serving or two modest ones. Do not scale up in a single pan; make separate omelettes, dividing the asparagus between them.
Filled omelettes of this kind fill pages of international cookbooks because the omelette was the standard vehicle for showing off a single good ingredient with almost no equipment. That the recipe reaches for canned asparagus tips rather than fresh is the period detail worth noticing: asparagus had a short spring season and was expensive, and commercial canning had by then put a passable version within reach of ordinary households all year. Tinned tips seem to have been treated as a respectable convenience rather than a compromise, and cookbooks of the era are often said to have recommended them freely in soups, salads and garnishes. The instruction to "dress" the dish is the older kitchen sense of the word, meaning to arrange for the table rather than to sauce.