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Omelette with Chives
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill milk, one tablespoon finely chopped fresh chives, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper, and sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes. Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, pour in the eggs, mix with a whisk for two minutes, let rest for half a minute; fold up the opposite sides to meet in the centre, let rest for one minute, turn out on a hot dish and serve.
A plain French-style rolled omelette, scaled for a family rather than a single plate. The measurements are the ones that need translating; the technique is still current.
- Half a gillIn American usage a gill is half a cup, so half a gill is about 4 tablespoons — a quarter cup of milk for eight eggs (an imperial gill is 5 fl oz, which would give a little more). That is a generous but workable amount; less milk gives a firmer fold.
- Two saltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so this is half a teaspoon of white pepper. That is assertive by modern taste; a quarter teaspoon is closer to what most cooks now want.
- Pan size is the hingeEight eggs will not roll in a small skillet. Use a 10- to 12-inch pan, or split the mixture and make two omelettes in an 8-inch pan.
- One tablespoon of butter is thinFor eight eggs in a large pan, two to three tablespoons is more realistic unless the pan is genuinely nonstick. The butter should foam and just stop hissing before the eggs go in.
- "Mix with a whisk for two minutes"This means constant stirring over moderate heat to build small curds, not aeration. Stop while the surface is still visibly wet — the resting half minute sets the base and the residual heat finishes the interior.
- ChivesOnly fresh will do here; dried chives contribute colour and nothing else. Snip with scissors rather than chopping with a knife, which bruises them and turns them dark.
- YieldServes three to four as a main course with bread, or six as part of a larger breakfast.
The omelette aux fines herbes and its single-herb variants were a fixture of French bourgeois cooking long before they reached English-language books, and chives are the mildest of the classic fines herbes quartet with parsley, tarragon and chervil. The early twentieth-century American appetite for continental cooking ran strong: many hotel and restaurant kitchens of the period were French-trained, and a competent rolled omelette was one of the first things a cook was expected to produce on demand. The instruction to fold "the opposite sides to meet in the centre" describes what is generally taken to be the older three-fold shape rather than the half-moon many home cooks make now.