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Omelette with Sausages
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add half gill milk, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Sharply beat with fork two minutes. Cut four skinned country sausages into quarter-inch pieces, place in a black frying pan with a tablespoon melted butter and fry five minutes, lightly tossing meanwhile, add half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, pour in the eggs, sharply mix with a fork two minutes, let rest for half a minute; fold up the opposite sides to meet in center, let rest for a minute. Turn upon a hot dish and serve.
A plain French-style folded omelette with sausage, written in the terse professional shorthand of a hotel kitchen. Two measurements and one piece of equipment need translating.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of milk is 1/4 cup (about 60 ml). That is generous for eight eggs; 2 tablespoons gives a firmer set if you prefer.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon, which is assertive but deliberate — white pepper was usual in this style of cooking, the reason generally given being that dark flecks were unwanted in the eggs.
- The black frying panA seasoned carbon-steel or cast-iron omelette pan, not enamelware. For eight eggs you want 10 to 12 inches across; anything smaller and the omelette becomes too thick to fold in the manner described.
- Country sausagesFresh coarse pork sausage, uncured and unsmoked — a breakfast-style link. "Skinned" means slipping off the casing before cutting, which lets the pieces brown on all faces.
- Five minutes may not be enoughQuarter-inch pieces of fresh pork sausage should be cooked through and browned before the eggs go in, since the egg cooks in about three minutes total. Check a piece; give it longer if the interior is still pink.
- The hinge: two minutes of stirring, then stopThe sharp fork-mixing sets small curds and builds body; the half-minute rest lets the underside form a skin you can fold against. Keep stirring past that point and you get scrambled eggs with sausage instead of an omelette.
- Heat levelMedium to medium-high throughout. The whole egg stage lasts under four minutes, and the omelette is meant to leave the pan pale and barely coloured, not browned.
- YieldEight eggs and four sausages serves three to four as a main course. Serve immediately — a folded omelette continues cooking on the hot dish and stiffens within a minute or two.
The International Cook Book belongs to a genre of early twentieth-century compendiums written by professional chefs for a public that had begun to eat in restaurants and wanted the same dishes at home, and the style here is unmistakably that of a working line cook: numbered eggs, timed intervals, no explanation offered. The omelette is folded rather than rolled, with the sausage fried in the pan before the eggs are poured over it. What dates the recipe is the sausage: "country sausage" meant a fresh, coarsely ground, unsmoked pork link from a butcher, distinct from the cured and smoked sausages that shared the counter, and the instruction to skin it assumes a natural casing rather than the skinless patties that later became common. The insistence on white pepper and on a black pan are both marks of professional training, the first for appearance and the second because a well-seasoned iron surface was among the most reliable non-stick surfaces available.