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Omelette with Sweet Peppers
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill milk, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper and beat with a fork for two minutes. Finely slice four Spanish sweet peppers, place in a frying pan with a tablespoon melted butter and lightly brown for five minutes, tossing them meanwhile; drop in eggs, mix with fork for two minutes and let rest half minute; fold up the two sides to meet in centre, let rest one minute, turn on a hot dish and serve.
A large French-style rolled omelette built on softened sweet peppers. The measurements are old but unambiguous, and the whole thing runs about ten minutes once the pan is hot.
- Half a gill of milkA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 2 fluid ounces dash 1/4 cup, or 4 tablespoons. That is a generous amount of liquid for eight eggs; it gives a softer, looser curd rather than a firm one.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon. White pepper was the usual choice for pale dishes; black pepper will do if the flecks do not bother you, though the flavour is not quite the same.
- Spanish sweet peppersMost likely ripe, thick-walled red peppers of the pimiento type rather than the long, thin-walled frying peppers now sold under Spanish names. Two medium red bell peppers, seeded and cut in thin strips, will roughly cover the four called for, depending on their size.
- Five minutes is not enough for the peppersSliced raw peppers need 8 to 10 minutes over medium heat to lose their crunch and sweeten. Get them fully soft and just catching colour before the eggs go in, because after that point the timing belongs to the eggs.
- Pan size and butterEight eggs need a 10- to 12-inch nonstick or well-seasoned pan, and one tablespoon of butter will be thin cover for it dash two is safer. In a smaller pan the omelette is too deep to set in the two minutes given.
- The fold"Fold up the two sides to meet in centre" is the classic tri-fold, not a half-moon. Loosen the edges with the fork, fold each third inward, then invert the pan onto the hot platter so the seam ends up underneath.
- DonenessThe instruction to rest half a minute, fold, then rest one minute assumes the centre finishes off the heat. Pull the pan when the top still looks glossy and barely set; residual heat carries it the rest of the way.
- YieldEight eggs serve four as a main course, six as part of a larger meal. Serve it the moment it leaves the pan dash it deflates and weeps within a few minutes.
Omelettes with peppers turn up across the whole western Mediterranean, from Basque piperade to Spanish and Italian versions that pile sweetened peppers into beaten egg, and cookbooks of the early twentieth century tended to file them all under a vaguely Iberian heading. Books like this one were assembled at a moment when French-trained cooks were common in high-end American hotel and restaurant kitchens, which may help explain why the technique here is strictly French dash beaten with a fork, stirred briefly, folded in thirds, turned out on a hot dish dash while the filling is borrowed from elsewhere. The call for Spanish sweet peppers reflects a real trade: canned and dried pimientos from Spain were widely imported into the United States in this period, and the fresh thick-walled red pepper was still enough of a specialty item to be worth naming by origin.