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Omelette with Cucumbers
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add half a gill milk, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper; briskly beat up for two minutes. Peel and finely slice a sound, fresh cucumber. Heat one and a half tablespoons butter in a frying pan, add the cucumber, season with three saltspoons salt and two saltspoons white pepper and gently brown for six minutes, frequently tossing meanwhile. Drop in the eggs, mix well with a fork for two minutes and let rest for half a minute; fold up the opposite sides to meet in the centre, let rest for a minute, turn on a hot dish and serve.
An eight-egg French-style omelette with browned cucumber folded through it. The measurements are pre-standard but easily converted, and the one real risk is water from the cucumber.
- Half a gillA US gill is 4 fluid ounces, so half a gill of milk is 2 fluid ounces, or 4 tablespoons (an imperial gill is 5 fl oz, which would make it 2½ fl oz). That is still a restrained amount for eight eggs and should stay that way — more milk gives a wetter, looser curd.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. The recipe therefore asks for about 1¼ teaspoons of salt in total, plus ½ teaspoon pepper in the eggs (the type is not specified) and ½ teaspoon white pepper on the cucumber. Season the cucumber lightly if you are salting it beforehand to draw out water.
- Drain the cucumber firstThis is the hinge. A sliced cucumber is mostly water, and six minutes in butter will steam rather than brown unless the slices are salted for 20 minutes, drained and patted dry. Seedy supermarket cucumbers should also be halved and seeded; a firm Persian or English cucumber needs no peeling.
- Brown, then cook the eggs separately if you likeGetting real colour on cucumber takes a hot pan and space. If the slices crowd, cook them in a second pan and add them to the eggs at the fold instead of the bottom of the pan, which also keeps the omelette from tearing.
- Pan sizeEight eggs need a 10- to 12-inch nonstick or well-seasoned pan. In anything smaller the omelette is too thick to fold cleanly and the interior stays raw while the base sets hard.
- TimingTwo minutes of stirring, thirty seconds of rest and a minute after folding is a genuine French omelette schedule over medium heat — the centre stays loose and creamy (baveuse). Cook it longer if you want it firm all through, but then expect a drier result than the author intended.
- YieldServes four as a lunch or supper dish, three if it is the only thing on the plate.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) is his attempt at a global reference — hundreds of short, telegraphic recipes written in the same clipped house style, with the seasonings specified down to the saltspoon in a way that reflects professional kitchen discipline rather than home cooking. Cooked cucumber, which strikes many modern readers as odd, was entirely routine in nineteenth-century French and Central European cooking: it was stewed in butter, stuffed, glazed as a garnish for fish, and served much as one would serve marrow or courgette. The idea that cucumbers belong only in salads and pickles is largely a twentieth-century narrowing of the vegetable's range, and this omelette is a small survival of the older habit.