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Omelette with Olives
Remove stones and finely slice twelve queen olives. Place them in a small saucepan with two tablespoons sherry and half teaspoon fresh, finely chopped tarragon leaves, cover pan and let steam on corner of range for fifteen minutes, then transfer to a bowl. Break in eight fresh eggs, add a half gill milk, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper and briskly beat up with fork for two minutes.
Heat a tablespoon good fresh butter in a frying pan, drop in eggs, mix with fork for two minutes, then let rest for half a minute; fold up opposite sides to meet in centre, let rest for one minute, turn omelette on hot dish and serve.
A large French-style rolled omelette built on eight eggs, with the olives softened in sherry first so they season the whole thing rather than sitting in it as salty lumps. Two details need translating: the measures, and the vague heat of a coal range.
- Half a gill of milkA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 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, so two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon. That is assertive; start with half that if your pepper is freshly ground.
- "Corner of range"The cool end of a coal range, used for slow steaming. On a modern hob this is the lowest setting with the lid on, and fifteen minutes is about right to soften the olives and cook off the raw edge of the sherry.
- Queen olivesLarge green Spanish olives, usually brine-cured and quite salty. Rinse and drain them before slicing, and hold back on the half teaspoon of salt until you have tasted the steamed olive mixture.
- ButterOne tablespoon in the pan is scant for eight eggs in anything but a well-seasoned or nonstick surface. Two is safer, and the pan should be hot enough that the butter foams but does not brown.
- The hingeTwo minutes of stirring, thirty seconds of rest, fold, one minute more. That total is deliberately short; an eight-egg omelette carries enough residual heat to keep setting on the hot dish, so pull it while the centre still looks underdone.
- Pan size and yieldEight eggs need a 12-inch pan to fold properly. In a 10-inch pan, split the mixture and make two omelettes. Serves three to four.
The International Cook Book belongs to the wave of early twentieth-century American volumes that promised the home cook access to "the world's kitchen" and French, Italian, Spanish and Creole dishes rewritten for a household with a coal range and a hired girl. The olive-and-sherry combination points to Spain, though the technique here is squarely French: the folded, barely-set rolled omelette rather than the flat, potato-bound tortilla. Tarragon points the same way, being closely associated with the French fines herbes tradition, in which the herb omelette was a standard of the repertoire.