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Omelette with Oysters
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill cream, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper, and sharply beat up with fork for two minutes. Place eighteen freshly opened oysters in a saucepan with their liquor and one gill water, season with three saltspoons salt and saltspoon cayenne, let boil for three minutes and skim off froth from surface. Mix in another small saucepan a tablespoon butter with tablespoon flour. Strain the liquor of the oysters into this pan, sharply mix with whisk until it comes to a boil, then let boil for five minutes. Dilute an egg yolk with a tablespoon cream and the juice of quarter of a lemon and add to the sauce, sharply mixing while cooking one minute, then add oysters, mix well and keep hot. Thoroughly heat a tablespoon melted butter in a black frying pan, drop in eggs, sharply mix at bottom with fork for two minutes, then let rest for half minute; fold up opposite sides to meet in centre, let rest for one minute, turn on a hot dish, pour oysters and sauce over omelette and serve.
A filled omelette in the French service style, where the garnish is spooned over rather than enclosed. The measurements are workable once the old units are converted.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is 1/2 cup, so a half gill is 1/4 cup cream and one gill is 1/2 cup water. A saltspoon is roughly 1/4 teaspoon, so "two saltspoons pepper" is about 1/2 teaspoon and "three saltspoons salt" about 3/4 teaspoon.
- The oysters are the hingeThree minutes at a boil is too long for shucked oysters; they firm up and shrink. Poach them just until the edges ruffle, under a minute, then lift them out and reserve them while you build the sauce from their liquor.
- Salt the poaching liquid lightlyOyster liquor is already saline, and the recipe then reduces that liquor into a velouté sauce for five minutes. Hold back most of the 3/4 teaspoon and season the finished sauce at the end.
- The liaisonThe yolk beaten with cream and lemon juice is a classic liaison. Once it goes in, keep the sauce below a simmer, or the yolk will curdle and the sauce will look grainy.
- A black frying panThis means a well-seasoned carbon steel or cast iron pan, the traditional omelette pan. Any nonstick pan of 8 to 10 inches works; eight eggs is at the upper limit for that size.
- Butter for the panOne tablespoon is scant for eight eggs in a large pan. Two is safer, heated until it foams and just begins to smell nutty, but not browned.
- YieldServes three to four as a lunch or supper dish. The omelette is best divided at the table rather than portioned in the pan.
Oyster omelettes turn up across the late-nineteenth-century restaurant repertoire on both sides of the Atlantic, when shucked oysters were cheap, abundant and sold by the quart in American cities. The method here is straightforwardly professional French cooking: a roux thickened with the oysters' own liquor, finished with a yolk-and-cream liaison and sharpened with lemon, close to what the old kitchens would have called a velouté or, when the poaching liquid was seafood, a sauce normande. Pouring the garnish over an omelette rather than folding it inside was a familiar restaurant treatment, though the book gives no reason for it here. That the book calls for a "black frying pan" is a period detail worth noting: omelette pans were commonly reserved for omelettes and left unscoured, the seasoned surface doing the work of a nonstick coating.