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Omelette with Curry
Break eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill milk, half teaspoon salt, half teaspoon curry powder and two saltspoons pepper; sharply beat up with fork two minutes. Heat a tablespoon butter in a pan, drop in eggs, briskly stir with fork two minutes, let rest a half minute, fold up two opposite sides, let rest one minute. Turn on a hot dish and serve.
A plain French-style rolled omelette with curry powder stirred into the raw egg. The instructions are terse but complete; the main adjustments are pan size, fat, and knowing that the two-minute stir is a working figure, not a stopwatch reading.
- Half a gill of milkA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 2 fl oz, or 1/4 cup. That is a generous amount of liquid for eight eggs and will give a soft, slightly loose curd.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of pepper is half a teaspoon, which is assertive but correct alongside the curry.
- Bloom the curry powderCurry powder stirred into cold egg tastes raw and dusty. Warm it in the butter for fifteen to twenty seconds before the eggs go in, or toast it dry in the pan first; the difference is the whole dish.
- Pan and butterEight eggs need a 10 to 12 inch pan or they will set into a thick pad before the centre cooks. One tablespoon of butter is optimistic in anything but a well-seasoned or nonstick pan; two to three is safer and tastes better.
- HeatMedium is right. The recipe's rhythm of stir, rest, fold, rest depends on the base setting while the top stays glossy, which will not happen over high heat.
- The folding"Fold up two opposite sides" makes a tri-fold, not a half-moon. Tip the pan as you turn it out so the omelette lands seam-side down on the dish.
- DonenessThe total time in the pan is about three and a half minutes, which leaves the interior soft and just short of set. If that is not to your taste, add thirty seconds off the heat rather than more time over it, since residual heat keeps cooking the eggs on the plate.
- YieldEight eggs serves three to four as a main course. Curry powders vary enormously in salt and heat; taste yours before committing the full half teaspoon.
Curry powder had, by most accounts, been a British and American pantry staple for a long time by the time this book appeared, sold ready-blended by grocers and treated as a single seasoning rather than as a set of spices to be ground for each dish. Its appearance in a French-technique omelette is characteristic of the grand-hotel cooking of the period, in which the classical repertoire absorbed "Indian" flavour as a variation among many others. The method here is orthodox and unchanged today: eggs beaten only briefly, cooked fast in butter, stirred while liquid and then left alone to set a skin, folded and served immediately on a heated dish. That instruction to warm the plate is not a flourish; a large omelette loses heat quickly.