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Omelette with Cauliflower
Remove stalk and leaves from a medium, fresh, sound cauliflower, place in a saucepan with two quarts water, one gill milk, one teaspoon salt, and boil forty minutes. Remove, drain, then press through a sieve into a small saucepan, add teaspoon butter, three saltspoons grated nutmeg, and sharply mix while heating three minutes.
Carefully crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add half gill milk, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Sharply beat with fork two minutes. Heat tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, drop in the eggs, sharply mix with fork two minutes, let rest for half a minute. Spread a third of the cauliflower over the omelette, fold up the sides to meet in the centre, let rest for one minute. Turn on a hot dish, arrange balance of cauliflower at both ends of the dish and serve.
A folded omelette filled with cauliflower purée, written in the clipped house style of a hotel kitchen. Two measures and one boiling time need attention before you start.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup, so "half gill milk" in the eggs is 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: three saltspoons of nutmeg is about 3/4 teaspoon, which is assertive but deliberate, and two saltspoons pepper is half a teaspoon.
- Forty minutes is far too longA whole medium cauliflower needs roughly 15 to 20 minutes in boiling water to be tender enough to purée, less if broken into florets. Forty minutes gives you grey, sulphurous mush. Test with a knife tip at the stem.
- Why the milk goes in the waterThe gill of milk in the cooking water is there to keep the curd white, a standard trick of the period. It works, and it does no harm; a squeeze of lemon does the same job.
- Drain the purée hardThis is the hinge. Cauliflower holds a great deal of water, and a wet filling will split the omelette and pool on the platter. After sieving, cook the purée in the butter over medium heat until it stiffens and pulls away from the pan, longer than the three minutes given if it still looks loose.
- Sieve, ricer or processorPressing through a sieve is the original method and gives the finest texture. A food mill or potato ricer is quicker; a food processor works but will loosen the purée further, so allow extra drying time in the pan.
- Eight eggs in one panEight eggs need a 10 to 12 inch pan over medium heat, and a tablespoon of butter is the minimum. "Sharply mix with fork two minutes" means stirring the curds as they set, then letting the base film over during the half-minute rest before you fill and fold.
- YieldServes three to four as a lunch or supper dish. Only a third of the purée goes inside; the rest is banked at the ends of the platter, so a warmed serving dish matters.
Omelettes stuffed with a vegetable purée belong to the professional French repertoire that hotel and restaurant cooks in Europe and America worked from around 1900, and this book's terse numbered style — exact quarts, gills and saltspoons, timings to the half minute — reads like a kitchen brigade's instruction rather than a home cook's note. The nutmeg is a period signature: cauliflower, and cream sauces built on it, were often seasoned that way in nineteenth-century cookery. The long boiling time may reflect a difference in taste as much as ignorance; vegetables seem to have been expected to be thoroughly soft, and the pleasure of a barely cooked cauliflower florette appears to be a later idea.