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Omelette with Smoked Beef
Mince very finely two ounces smoked beef and place in a saucepan with a pint cold water and boil for five minutes. Drain well on a sieve. Heat one tablespoon melted butter in a small saucepan, adding one tablespoon flour, and stir well while cooking for one minute; then pour in two gills hot milk. Season with two tablespoons salt, a saltspoon cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg; thoroughly mix, then add the drained beef, stir well and cook for five minutes, mixing occasionally.
Prepare an omelette, and just before folding up the two sides of the omelette place half the prepared beef--but no sauce--right in the centre of the omelette, fold up, turn on a hot dish and arrange the beef and sauce around the omelette. Sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A creamed chipped-beef filling folded into a plain French omelette. One measurement in the original is almost certainly a printer's error and will ruin the dish if followed.
- The salt is wrongTwo tablespoons of salt in a cup of sauce is inedible, and the beef is cured to begin with. Read it as a saltspoon, matching the cayenne and nutmeg beside it, and taste before adding any at all.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon. The cayenne at that quantity is assertive; the nutmeg at that quantity is right.
- Two gillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup of hot milk against a tablespoon each of butter and flour. That gives a loose pouring sauce rather than a thick one.
- Smoked beefThis is salt-cured, air-dried beef sliced paper-thin, sold now as chipped or dried beef in jars or packets.
- Why the water boilThe five-minute boil is chiefly to draw out salt rather than to cook the meat. Drain it hard and press it in the sieve, or the sauce will be watery.
- Cook the roux brieflyOne minute of stirring is enough to lose the raw-flour taste without colouring it. Add the hot milk off the heat in a stream, whisking, then return to a low flame.
- Filling and sauce are separatedLift the drained beef out with a slotted spoon for the centre of the omelette; the sauce goes around it on the dish. Beef in sauce inside the eggs will tear the fold and soak it.
- YieldThe recipe makes filling for two omelettes -- it says half goes in the centre.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York. This dish sets a classic French rolled omelette beside an American storecupboard staple: chipped beef in béchamel, the same creamed dried beef that Americans were spooning over toast at the time. Salt-cured, smoked, air-dried beef predates refrigeration by centuries and survived into the twentieth century as a shelf-stable convenience food, sold ready-sliced, which is why a cookbook aimed at hotel and household kitchens alike could assume it on hand. The preliminary boil in water suggests the commercial product of the period was saltier than a cream sauce wants.