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Omelette with Parmesan Cheese
Break eight fresh eggs into a bowl. Season with half teaspoon salt, half saltspoon cayenne pepper; add half gill cold milk; briskly beat up with a whisk for two minutes. Add two ounces grated Parmesan cheese; lightly mix, then proceed to make the omelette, and serve very hot.
A plain French-style rolled omelette enriched with grated cheese, written for a cook who already knows the technique. The instruction to "proceed to make the omelette" assumes you can do the pan work unaided.
- Half a gill of milkA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup (2 fl oz) — a generous amount for eight eggs. Reduce it to a tablespoon or two if you want the curd to set firmly rather than loosely.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is roughly 1/4 teaspoon, so half a saltspoon of cayenne is about 1/8 teaspoon. That is enough to be noticeable in eight eggs without reading as a spicy dish.
- The two-minute whiskingBeating that long incorporates air and will make the omelette puff and then weep. Whisk only until the yolks and whites are uniform, about 20 to 30 seconds, unless you want a soufflé-like texture.
- ParmesanTwo ounces of genuine grated Parmigiano-Reggiano is about 3/4 cup loosely packed. It is already salty; taste before adding the full half teaspoon of salt.
- Adding the cheeseMixing it all into the raw egg, as written, means some of it will stick to the pan and scorch. One option is to hold back half and scatter it over the surface just before rolling.
- Pan and heatEight eggs is too much for one omelette in a domestic pan. Divide into two batches in a 9- or 10-inch nonstick or well-seasoned pan, over medium-high heat, with plenty of butter, cooking each in under two minutes.
- DonenessA French omelette is pulled from the pan while the centre is still slightly loose; residual heat finishes it on the plate. "Serve very hot" is the operative phrase — it deteriorates within a minute or two.
- YieldEight eggs serves four as a light main course, or two to three if it is the centre of the meal.
Omelettes appear in enormous numbers in professional cookbooks of the period — Filippini, whose principal work dates from 1889, Escoffier and their imitators list dozens of variations differing only by garnish; the omelette was often said to be the classic test of a young cook's pan control and among the cheapest ways for a hotel kitchen to fill a breakfast or supper card. Parmesan was one of the few imported cheeses that travelled reliably before refrigeration: hard, dry, long-keeping, and sold grated or in wedges in American cities, which is why it turns up in "international" chapters far more often than fresh Italian cheeses do. The style here — eggs beaten with a little milk, seasoned with cayenne rather than black pepper — is the standard hotel formula of the period.