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Omelette with Eggplant
Cut in small dice pieces half of a peeled medium eggplant. Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, add the eggplant, season with half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons pepper, and gently brown eight minutes, occasionally tossing meanwhile; add half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, half bean sound chopped garlic, and toss well again. Carefully crack eight fresh eggs into a bowl, add a half gill milk, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Sharply beat with a fork for two minutes, drop eggs into pan, mix with fork for two minutes, let rest for a minute; fold up the opposite sides to meet in centre, let rest for a minute, turn on a hot dish and serve.
A French-style folded omelette with a sautéed eggplant filling stirred through rather than spooned in. The original's measures are pre-standard and its pepper is heavy by modern taste.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Three saltspoons of pepper in the eggplant is a scant three-quarter teaspoon, and two in the eggs is half a teaspoon — assertive but not a misprint. Halve both if you want the eggs to taste of egg.
- Half a gill of milkA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is two fluid ounces: a quarter cup, or four tablespoons. That is a workable ratio for eight eggs; much more liquid and the curd weeps.
- "Half bean sound chopped garlic"Read as half a bean's bulk of sound (unblemished) garlic, chopped; 'a bean' served as a rough period measure. A very small quantity — a background note, not a garlic dish.
- Salting the eggplantThe recipe skips it, and with a modern eggplant browned only eight minutes you may want it: dice, salt lightly, drain twenty minutes, blot. Then reduce the half teaspoon of salt in the pan accordingly.
- Butter for the eggplantOne tablespoon for half a diced eggplant is optimistic — eggplant is a sponge. Expect to add another tablespoon or a little oil, and keep the heat brisk so it browns rather than steams.
- The hingeTwo minutes of stirring, then one minute of rest, is the whole technique. Stir with the fork flat until the eggs are soft, wet curds, then stop entirely so the underside sets into a skin that will hold the fold. Moving the pan after that point tears it.
- Pan sizeEight eggs need a 10 to 12 inch pan. In anything smaller the omelette is too deep to set before the base colours; split the mixture and make two.
- YieldServes three to four as a main course with bread. Serve immediately — a folded omelette holds its texture for about a minute on the plate.
Eggplant in an omelette is more a Mediterranean habit than a Parisian one: the technique here is the classic French folded omelette, while the filling belongs to Provence, Italy and the Levant, where eggplant had long been an everyday vegetable. In early twentieth-century American cookery it appears more often fried in slices or stuffed than treated this way. The wording, with its saltspoons, gills and sequence of timed steps, reads as professional rather than domestic.