Home › The World's Kitchen › Omelette with Tarragon
Omelette with Tarragon
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add five fresh tarragon leaves, half gill milk, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Sharply beat up with the fork two minutes.
Heat an ounce of butter in a frying pan, drop in the eggs, thoroughly mix with the fork two minutes, let rest half a minute; fold on the opposite sides to meet in the centre, let rest one minute. Turn on a hot dish and serve.
A plain French-style rolled omelette scaled for a large pan. The instructions are terse but complete; the only real difficulties are the old measures and the size of the egg mass.
- Half gill of milkA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 2 fluid ounces — 1/4 cup. That is a generous amount of liquid for eight eggs and will give a softer, slightly looser curd.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of pepper is half a teaspoon. That is assertive by current taste; start with half of it if you are using freshly ground black pepper.
- An ounce of butterTwo tablespoons. In a pan wide enough for eight eggs this is barely enough to coat the surface, so swirl it up the sides before the eggs go in.
- Pan sizeEight eggs want a wide pan, roughly 10 to 12 inches, so the egg stays shallow enough to fold. In anything much smaller the centre will be slow to set and the omelette is harder to close cleanly.
- HeatThe recipe never says, and it matters most here: the butter should foam but not colour, and the pan should be over moderate heat throughout. A French omelette of this kind is meant to stay pale, with no browning on the underside.
- The two minutes of stirring"Thoroughly mix with the fork two minutes" means constant agitation to build small curds, not scrambling into large ones. Once the eggs are mostly set but still glossy, stop and let the base firm during the half-minute rest.
- TarragonFive leaves is a light hand. Use French tarragon, chopped. Russian tarragon, sold under the same name, has almost no anise flavour and is not a substitute.
- YieldEight eggs serves three to four as a main course. If you would rather make individual omelettes, work in batches of two or three eggs in an 8-inch pan and cut the timings roughly in half.
The omelette with a single herb sets the egg as a plain ground for one clear flavour rather than a vehicle for fillings; tarragon — estragon — is the herb here, and its aniseed note comes through the cooking. The book's rigid two-minutes-beat, two-minutes-stir, half-minute-rest structure is characteristic: The International Cook Book is generally attributed to Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and its brief numbered movements read like line instructions written down for a home audience. Note too the assumption that fresh tarragon is at hand — and that the recipe specifies leaves rather than a spoonful.