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Omelette with Bacon
Carefully crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill fresh milk, season with a half teaspoon salt two saltspoons white pepper. Sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes. Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, add one ounce bacon cut into small dice-pieces and gently brown for five minutes. Drain half the fat from the pan, then drop in the eggs. Mix for two minutes with a fork, let rest for a minute, fold up both sides to meet in the centre; let rest for a half minute, turn into a hot dish and serve.
A plain French-style folded omelette with bacon, written for a cook who already knows the motion. The measurements need translating and the pan size is assumed rather than stated.
- Half a gill of milkA gill in American use is 4 fl oz, half a cup, so half a gill is 2 fl oz — a quarter cup. (A British gill is 5 fl oz, which would make it a shade more.) That works out to roughly half a tablespoon of liquid per egg, on the looser side of usual, so the mixture wants handling quickly.
- Two saltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon. That is assertive by modern taste; a quarter teaspoon is closer to what most cooks would want.
- Pan sizeEight eggs will not fold cleanly in a small skillet. Use a 10- to 12-inch nonstick or well-seasoned pan, or divide the mixture and make two omelettes of four eggs each, which is what most cooks will find easier.
- The hinge is the heatMedium heat, not high. The instruction to "mix for two minutes with a fork" means stirring the setting curds constantly while shaking the pan, then stopping and letting the base set for the final minute. Overcook it and the eggs weep.
- One ounce of baconAbout one thick slice, cut into small dice. Five minutes over gentle heat renders it without hardening it; crisp lardons in an omelette turn to gravel against the soft egg.
- Draining the fatPour off half the rendered bacon fat, as directed, but leave enough to film the pan. Too much fat and the egg slides instead of setting; too little and it grips.
- YieldEight eggs serves three to four as a main course, or six as part of a larger breakfast. Serve immediately — a folded omelette continues to cook in its own heat on the plate.
The International Cook Book is generally credited to Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and its plan was to run through the cooking of many nations in short, uniform entries of exactly this kind: a paragraph, no yield, no pan size, no discussion. The technique here is French — beat, stir over heat, rest, fold both sides to the centre — as opposed to the flat, set omelette of Spain. The instruction to "crack eight fresh eggs" is not filler; in a period before reliable cold chains, egg freshness was a real variable, and cookbooks of the era comment on it repeatedly.