Home › The World's Kitchen › Omelette with Puree of Asparagus
Omelette with Puree of Asparagus
Plunge a pint of drained, canned asparagus tips into a pint of boiling water for two minutes. Thoroughly drain, then with the aid of a puree brush press the asparagus through a small sieve into a small saucepan. Season with half teaspoon salt, one saltspoon cayenne pepper and half teaspoon fine sugar; add half ounce butter. Mix well and let cook for five minutes. Then proceed to prepare an omelette and just before folding it up spread one-third of the asparagus puree over the omelette, fold up, let rest for a minute; turn on to a hot dish. Arrange the balance of the asparagus at both ends of the fish and serve.
A French rolled omelette with a seasoned asparagus puree folded in and spooned around the plate. The original assumes you already know how to make the omelette, so the only real work here is the puree.
- "At both ends of the fish"A printer's error for "dish" — there is no fish in this recipe. The remaining two-thirds of the puree is banked at either end of the finished omelette.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A full quarter teaspoon of cayenne in a pint of asparagus is assertive but not unreasonable; start with half that and taste.
- Puree brush and sieveA puree brush was a stiff-bristled tool for forcing food through a tamis. A rubber spatula against a fine-mesh sieve does the same job, and a food mill fitted with the fine plate is faster. Canned tips are soft enough that a food processor will not give you the smooth, fibre-free texture a sieve does.
- The two-minute plungePresumably to refresh the canned asparagus and rinse off the brine; the recipe does not say. There is no reason to extend it, as the tips are already fully cooked.
- Butter and sugarHalf an ounce of butter is one tablespoon. "Fine sugar" means superfine or caster sugar; the small quantity here is not enough to make the dish sweet, and likely serves to balance asparagus that has been sitting in brine.
- Cooking the pureeFive minutes over low heat, stirred, is enough to tighten it and cook off water. A thin puree will run out of the omelette; it should hold its shape on a spoon.
- The omelette itselfThe recipe assumes you know the method and gives no egg count or pan size. A plain French omelette, cooked fast in a well-buttered pan and folded while the centre is still loose, is what is meant; fill and fold at that point, and the residual heat sets it during the minute of resting.
- YieldAs written this makes one omelette: one generous serving or two light ones. Only a third of the puree goes inside, so the balance serves as garnish.
Canned asparagus tips are the quiet tell that this is a book of its moment. Commercial canning of asparagus was well established in America and France, and cookbooks of the kind treat tinned tips as an ordinary pantry item rather than a compromise — a way to put a spring vegetable into a January omelette. The technique is straight out of the classical French repertoire: an omelette fourrée, a rolled omelette filled just before the fold, with the surplus garnish arranged at the ends of the dish so the plate reads as a composed course rather than a plain egg dish. The insistence on passing the asparagus through a sieve rather than simply chopping it belongs to the same tradition, where a puree was expected to be uniformly smooth; the seasoning with a little sugar and cayenne alongside the salt reads as a correction for a vegetable that has been sitting in brine.