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Omelette with Beef Marrow
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill cream, half teaspoon salt, two salt spoons pepper, and sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes. Cut two ounces beef marrow into small square pieces and plunge in hot water for two minutes, lift up with a skimmer, place in frying pan with a teaspoon melted butter and briskly fry for five minutes. Sprinkle over two saltspoons salt, a half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, toss well and drop in eggs. Mix with fork while cooking for two minutes and let rest for half a minute; fold up opposite sides to meet in centre and let rest for a minute, turn on a hot-dish and serve.
A French rolled omelette enriched with poached beef marrow. Everything hinges on the marrow: it wants only enough heat to soften and warm through, because prolonged frying renders it to liquid fat and the omelette turns greasy.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so a half gill of cream is 1/4 cup (2 fl oz). A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making "two saltspoons" a half teaspoon of pepper and, later, a half teaspoon of salt.
- Getting the marrowTwo ounces means the soft interior of beef leg or femur bones; a butcher will cut canoe-cut marrow bones, or sell them cross-cut. Soaking the bones in cold water for a few hours loosens the marrow so it pushes out in one piece.
- Blanch, don't boilThe two minutes in hot water is a poach, not a boil: barely simmering water sets the marrow rather than dissolving it. Note the recipe dices the marrow first and blanches the pieces afterwards.
- Five minutes is too longMarrow is almost pure fat and begins to melt near body temperature. One to two minutes over moderate heat is enough to warm the cubes; five minutes of brisk frying leaves you with a puddle of drippings and nothing to bite.
- Pan sizeEight eggs need a 10- to 12-inch pan with sloping sides for a single omelette. In a smaller pan the eggs set too thick to fold, and the mixture can instead be divided into two omelettes of four eggs each.
- The fold"Fold up opposite sides to meet in centre" is the tri-fold French omelette, not the American half-moon. The rests of thirty seconds and a minute let the surface set just enough to hold the shape when it is rolled out onto the hot dish.
- DonenessTwo minutes of stirring gives a French omelette that is still creamy inside, which is the intent here. If you prefer eggs fully set, hold it in the pan another minute before folding rather than raising the heat.
- YieldEight eggs serve three to four as a main course. Serve it the moment it leaves the pan; marrow congeals as it cools and the texture suffers.
Beef marrow was a standard richness in nineteenth-century professional cooking, and dishes marked à la moelle — poached marrow on toast, in sauce bordelaise, folded into forcemeats — turn up throughout the French repertoire that American hotel kitchens inherited. Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, compiled The International Cook Book from exactly that tradition, and its egg chapter runs to dozens of omelette variations built on one method with a different garnish each time. Marrow appears here for the same reason it appeared on restaurant menus generally: butchers broke down whole carcasses, marrow bones were cheap and abundant, and a kitchen that already had stockpots going had marrow to hand daily. The ingredient has come back into fashion as roasted bones, but as a folded-into-eggs enrichment it largely vanished with the era of the in-house butcher.