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Rum Omelette
Carefully crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill milk, season with a saltspoon salt, two tablespoons sugar and sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes. Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, drop in the egg, mix with a fork for two minutes and let rest for a minute; fold up, let rest for a half minute, turn on a hot dish and sprinkle two tablespoons fine sugar over the omelette; glaze the surface with a red-hot poker, pour a half gill good Jamaica rum over, set fire to the rum and send to the table.
A sweet flambé omelette of the Delmonico school, written for a cook with a coal range and a poker in the fire. The technique translates directly, with two substitutions.
- A half gillA gill is 4 fluid ounces, so a half gill is 1/4 cup. That applies to both the milk in the eggs and the rum poured over at the end.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon holds about 1/4 teaspoon. It is there to sharpen the sugar, not to make the eggs savory.
- The red-hot pokerThe poker was heated in the range fire and drawn across the sugared surface to caramelize it in stripes. A small butane torch does the same job; a broiler element set very close works if the dish is flameproof, though it browns evenly rather than in bars.
- Don't overwork the eggsTwo minutes of stirring in the pan, then rest, then fold: the interior should still be loose when it leaves the heat. Sugar in the eggs makes them color and set faster than a plain omelette, so the pan wants moderate heat, not high.
- Warm the rumCold spirit off the bottle is reluctant to catch. Warm the rum briefly in a small pan or ladle, off the heat, then pour and light. Jamaica rum of the period was a heavy, molasses-forward style; a dark rum is the nearest ordinary match.
- Flaming at the tablePour from a measure rather than the bottle, keep the bottle well away from the flame, and use a long match. Turn off any range hood fan while the flame burns. The alcohol burns off in under a minute and the flame is invisible in bright light, so let it die out on its own before serving.
- YieldEight eggs make one large omelette serving three to four as a dessert, cut at the table.
Sweet omelettes were a fixture of nineteenth-century restaurant dessert lists, and the rum version — omelette au rhum — belongs to the same family of flamed dishes served in grand hotel and restaurant dining rooms of the period. The instruction to glaze the sugar with a red-hot poker is a domestic and kitchen-side stand-in for the salamander, the heated iron long used to colour a surface without cooking what lay beneath it. The phrasing here — precise counts of eggs and tablespoons, and the closing command to "send to the table" — reads as professional kitchen language, written for a cook working to order rather than a housekeeper planning a family dinner.