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Omelette with Peas
Have three tablespoons cooked green peas or canned peas in a small saucepan with half pint water and a saltspoon salt and gently boil for four minutes. Drain well, replace them in the pan with half teaspoon butter. Season with a light saltspoon salt, a saltspoon sugar and a very light saltspoon white pepper; lightly toss till thoroughly hot.
Carefully crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, pour in half gill cold milk. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Sharply beat with a fork for two minutes, then add the peas; lightly mix. Proceed to finish the omelette.
A French-style rolled omelette with a warmed pea garnish folded through the eggs. The instructions stop short because the book assumes you have already read its master omelette entry.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon. A gill is half a cup, so half a gill of milk is 1/4 cup.
- "Proceed to finish the omelette"The page assumes its master omelette entry, so the method is not given here. In practice that means butter heated in an omelette pan, the eggs poured in and stirred briefly, then the base allowed to set before rolling or folding out; it is a matter of a couple of minutes in the pan.
- Skip the second boilingBoiling already-cooked or canned peas for four more minutes in salted water leaves them grey and mealy. Drain canned peas and warm them in the butter and seasoning only; frozen peas need about 90 seconds in simmering water.
- Pepper levelTwo saltspoons of white pepper is roughly half a teaspoon in eight eggs, which reads as sharp to modern palates. Start with a quarter teaspoon.
- Sugar in the peasThe saltspoon of sugar is deliberate, not a slip. Period canned peas were flat-tasting, and a pinch of sugar restores the sweetness fresh garden peas have. With good frozen peas it is optional.
- Pan size and yieldEight eggs make a large omelette that serves three to four, and it is easier to handle as two four-egg omelettes in an 8-inch pan than one heavy one.
- Do not overbeatThe aim of the beating is to break the whites into the yolks rather than to raise a foam, since a foamed mixture gives a puffy, drier omelette instead of a dense, creamy one. Two minutes of sharp fork beating, as directed, is already at the upper limit.
The rolled omelette folded around a warm vegetable garnish is a fixture of French professional cooking, where a dish of this kind would be listed as an omelette aux petits pois, and the terse cross-reference to "finish the omelette" is a sign of the trade: the master method was learned once and then applied to dozens of fillings. The International Cook Book (1906) was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its recipes carry the shorthand and the measuring vocabulary of a nineteenth-century restaurant kitchen, saltspoons and gills included. The instruction to season canned peas with a little sugar dates the entry as clearly as the units do: canning had made peas available year-round by the late 1800s, but the flavour was a poor substitute for the fresh article, and cooks are often said to have corrected it at the stove.