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Sardine Omelette
Carefully crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill milk, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper, and sharply beat with fork for two minutes. Remove skin and bones from six sardines in oil cut in small pieces, place in a frying pan with tablespoon butter and brown for two minutes, tossing meanwhile. Drop in eggs, briskly mix with fork for two minutes and let rest for half a minute; fold up opposite sides to meet in centre, let rest for one minute, turn on a hot dish and serve.
A large omelette built on tinned sardines, written in the clipped shorthand of a professional kitchen. The measurements are the only real obstacle.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of milk is 1/4 cup (4 tablespoons), which works out to roughly 1 1/2 teaspoons per egg.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Two of them is half a teaspoon of white pepper, which is assertive but correct against oily fish.
- Pan sizeEight eggs need a 10- to 12-inch pan to fold properly. In anything smaller the omelette is too deep to set in the two minutes the recipe allows and the centre stays raw.
- Drain the sardinesThe recipe says sardines in oil but never says to drain them. Lift them out and blot them, or the packing oil will pool under the eggs and the omelette will slide rather than set.
- Browning the fishTwo minutes of tossing in butter is meant to dry the sardines and concentrate them, not to crisp them. They are already cooked in the tin and will break down into shreds if worked hard; keep the heat moderate and the movement gentle.
- The hinge: the restThe half-minute rest after stirring is what makes the fold possible. Stop moving the fork, let the base set against the pan, then fold. Folding while the eggs are still fluid gives a scramble.
- YieldEight eggs serves four as a main course, six as part of a larger meal. Serve at once; a folded omelette carries on cooking on the hot dish.
Tinned sardines in oil were among the earlier industrially preserved foods to become cheap and widely available, and by the later nineteenth century they were a common store-cupboard item. They appear as one filling among many -- ham, cheese, fines herbes -- in the long lists of omelette variations that professional cookery books of the period ran through. The clipped wording and step-by-step timings here are characteristic of professional kitchen writing, and the omelette itself belongs to the French repertoire that dominated hotel and restaurant cooking on both sides of the Atlantic.