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Omelette with Fresh Mushrooms
Peel and thoroughly wash six medium, sound fresh mushrooms; drain well, then finely mince them. Place in frying pan with a tablespoon butter and cook on a moderate fire for six minutes, tossing once in a while. Carefully crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add half a gill milk. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes. Pour the beaten eggs over the mushrooms, mix with a fork while cooking for two minutes, then let rest for half minute; fold up the opposite sides to meet in the centre; let rest for a minute. Carefully turn upon a large hot dish and serve.
A plain French-style folded omelette, scaled for a family rather than a single portion. The only real difficulty is the size: eight eggs is a lot for one pan.
- 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 softer, looser set.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is conventionally reckoned a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is 1/2 teaspoon of pepper. If that is white pepper, which a kitchen of this sort may well have used, it is assertive but reasonable; with coarse black pepper you may want less.
- Peeling mushroomsCultivated white and cremini mushrooms today have thin, clean skins and need no peeling. Wipe or briefly rinse them and dry well rather than washing thoroughly, since waterlogged mushrooms steam instead of browning.
- Cook the mushrooms drySix minutes over medium heat is meant to drive off the mushroom liquid. If moisture is still pooling in the pan, keep going; wet mushrooms will thin the eggs and prevent the omelette from setting cleanly.
- Pan sizeEight eggs need a 10- to 12-inch nonstick or well-seasoned skillet. In anything smaller the omelette will be too thick to fold and will scramble before the centre sets.
- "Moderate fire"Medium heat on a modern burner. For the eggs themselves, medium is right too: the two minutes of stirring plus the brief rests assume enough heat to set the base but not brown it.
- The hingeThe half-minute rest before folding is what lets the base firm into a sheet you can lift. Fold while the top is still visibly moist; residual heat finishes it during the final minute in the pan.
- YieldServes three to four as a main course, four to six as part of a larger breakfast.
Filippini's International Cook Book belongs to the era of the great hotel kitchens, where the omelette was a test of touch rather than invention: butter, eggs, a garnish, and precise timings given in minutes and half-minutes. Fresh mushrooms are worth noting here. Commercial mushroom growing in caves and cellars had expanded considerably in France and the United States by the turn of the twentieth century, and the recipe can specify "fresh" and "sound" as a matter of course rather than sending the cook to a dried or tinned substitute. The instruction to peel them is often said to be a survival from a time when mushrooms arrived gritty and thick-skinned, though the explanation is surmise; in any case it stuck in cookbooks for decades after it stopped being necessary.