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Omelette with Sorrel
Prepare and keep hot a puree of sorrel. Carefully crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add half a gill cream, half a teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper; sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes. Heat one tablespoon butter in a frying pan, drop in the eggs, mix with a fork for two minutes, let rest for half a minute; spread a third of the sorrel in the centre of the omelette, fold up the two opposite sides to meet in the middle, let rest for one miunte. Turn on a hot dish, pour half a gill of hot demi-glace around the omelette and serve.
A French rolled omelette in the classic service style, with a sharp sorrel filling and a spoonful of brown sauce to set it off. The original assumes two things a modern cook has to supply: the sorrel purée and the demi-glace.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of cream is 4 tablespoons and half a gill of demi-glace is the same. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making two saltspoons of white pepper half a teaspoon.
- The sorrel puréeNot given here because the book expects you to have it. Sorrel collapses like nothing else: a pound of leaves, stemmed and washed, stewed in a little butter over low heat, will melt to a khaki purée in five to eight minutes. It needs no liquid and no blender. Season it and keep it warm; only a third of it goes into this omelette.
- Sorrel turns drab and that is normalThe acids in the leaf destroy the chlorophyll almost at once. A brown-green purée is correct and no sign of anything wrong. Cook it in stainless or enamel rather than bare aluminium or cast iron, which the acid will pick up as a metallic taste.
- Demi-glaceA reduced brown sauce built on veal stock, a day's work in a professional kitchen and the reason this recipe reads as short. A good reduced brown stock, or a commercial demi-glace concentrate, does the job; four tablespoons is a spoonful poured around, not over, the omelette.
- Eight eggs is a large panEight eggs need a 10- to 12-inch pan to cook as one omelette in the three and a half minutes of pan time the recipe allows. In anything smaller the centre stays liquid while the base sets. Splitting the mixture into two omelettes in an 8-inch pan is easier to fold.
- One tablespoon of butter is thinProbably assuming a well-seasoned omelette pan. In a modern nonstick pan it is enough; in anything else use two, and get the butter foaming before the eggs go in.
- The hinge: the half-minute restStirring for two minutes sets curds; the rest that follows lets the base firm into a skin strong enough to fold. Skip it and the omelette tears when you bring the sides together. Equally, the minute after folding is to warm the filling through, not to cook the omelette further — the interior should stay soft.
- YieldEight eggs serves three to four as a lunch dish, two as the substantial course the book has in mind.
Sorrel was a standard kitchen-garden green in Europe long before it became a specialist item, valued for the oxalic acid that gives the leaf its lemony bite at a time when lemons were expensive and seasonal. French cookery used it hard — in soup, with shad and salmon, and as the oseille purée assumed here — and it is that tradition this entry belongs to. The recipe's shape is pure restaurant French of the period: it presumes a purée and a demi-glace already standing on the stove, so the written instruction covers only the few minutes of assembly. Filippini's book drew heavily on the professional Franco-American kitchen of the great hotels, where those two preparations would have cost the line cook nothing but a ladle.