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Omelette with Capers
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, pour in a half gill milk, season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper, add two tablespoons capers and half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley. Sharply beat up for two minutes. Heat a tablespoon of butter in a frying pan, drop in the preparation, mix with a fork for two minutes, let rest for one minute; fold up two opposite sides right in the middle, let rest for half minute, turn on a hot dish and serve.
A plain French rolled omelette with capers folded through, written for a cook who already knows the motion. The measurements are the only real obstacle.
- Half a gillA gill is a quarter pint, so half a gill is 2 fluid ounces — about 4 tablespoons of milk for eight eggs. That is a generous but not unusual amount for the period; French practice today usually omits milk entirely, and leaving it out gives a firmer, less weepy curd.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of pepper is half a teaspoon, which is assertive alongside only half a teaspoon of salt — worth tasting toward rather than adding all at once.
- CapersSalt-packed capers need a soak and a rinse; brined capers need only a rinse and a good drain, or the omelette will be both wet and oversalted. Chop the larger ones so they distribute.
- Pan sizeEight eggs is too many for a standard 8-inch skillet if you want the classic fold. Use a 10- to 12-inch nonstick or well-seasoned pan, or divide the mixture and make two omelettes.
- Heat and butterOne tablespoon of butter in a large pan is thin coverage; two is safer unless the pan is nonstick. Medium heat, not high — the two minutes of stirring with a fork is meant to build soft curds, not to brown them.
- The rest before foldingThe minute of rest is the hinge. It lets the base set enough to lift while the top stays barely liquid, so the omelette holds its shape and finishes cooking from residual heat after it is turned out. Skipping it gives either a broken fold or a dry omelette.
- "Turn on a hot dish"Slide the omelette to the edge of the pan and invert it onto a warmed plate so the folded seam ends up underneath. A cold plate pulls heat out of it immediately.
- YieldEight eggs serves three to four as a main course, or six as part of a larger meal.
Caper omelettes belong to the standard repertoire of French hotel and restaurant cooking that American cookbooks drew on in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The capers themselves are the unopened flower buds of Capparis spinosa, a Mediterranean shrub; they reach the kitchen preserved in salt or in vinegar brine, and imported capers were obtainable from grocers and importers by the 1900s. The terse, imperative style here — crack, season, beat, fold, turn out, with timings given to the half minute — reads more like professional kitchen notation than domestic instruction, and it assumes a reader who needs only the proportions and the count.