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Tomato Omelette
Break eight fresh eggs into a bowl. Season with one-half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, adding one-half gill cold milk, and beat the whole thoroughly for two minutes. Place in quite a large frying pan one heavy tablespoon clarified butter and heat well without browning; that is, when the butter crackles, pour in quarter of a pint finely chopped, fresh-cooked stewed tomatoes, drawing off all their liquor; mix lightly and cook for two minutes; then drop in the beaten eggs over the tomatoes and with a fork gently mix the whole for three minutes. Let rest for one and a half minutes, fold up the two opposite sides, carefully turn into a hot dish and send to the table.
A plain French-style rolled omelette with a stewed tomato base, written for a cook who already knows the motion. Two details in the original need attention before you start.
- The measurementsHalf a gill of milk is 1/4 cup. A quarter of a pint of tomatoes is 1/2 cup, measured after the liquor is drained off. A saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon, so two of them is about 1/2 teaspoon white pepper for eight eggs — assertive by current taste; a quarter teaspoon is closer to modern seasoning.
- Draining the tomatoesThis is the hinge. Wet tomatoes will weep into the eggs and you will get scrambled eggs in pink liquid rather than an omelette. Cook the stewed tomatoes down until they mound on a spoon, then drain, then chop fine.
- Pan sizeEight eggs is a large omelette and needs a 10- to 12-inch pan; in anything smaller the eggs sit too deep to set in the time given. Nonstick or a well-seasoned carbon steel pan does the work the original expected of clarified butter.
- Clarified butterUsed here because the milk solids in whole butter scorch at omelette heat. A heavy tablespoon means a generous one, roughly 20 g. Ghee will serve the same purpose, though it tastes nuttier.
- "When the butter crackles"The crackle is the last traces of moisture going off, and it tells you the fat is hot: medium-high heat, hot enough that the eggs set on contact but not smoking. If the butter browns, wipe the pan and start again.
- The timingsThree minutes of gentle stirring with a fork, then ninety seconds of rest, is a French omelette worked to a soft, barely-set centre. That texture means the eggs are not fully cooked through; take it a minute further if you prefer them firm.
- Folding and turning out"Fold up the two opposite sides" means bringing both sides in over the centre, giving a tri-fold. Tip the pan away from you and turn the omelette onto the warmed dish so the seam ends up underneath.
- YieldEight eggs serves four as a main course or six as part of a larger meal. Serve immediately — a rolled omelette loses its texture within a few minutes.
The rolled, stirred-and-folded omelette described here is the French restaurant method, and the phrasing of this recipe — clarified butter, seasoning counted in saltspoons, the instruction to "send to the table" — belongs to the professional restaurant kitchens of the period. Tomato was one of the standard omelette garnishes in that repertoire, alongside fine herbs, cheese and mushrooms, and appears in French cookery lists as omelette à la portugaise or simply aux tomates. Its place in a book called The International Cook Book is worth noting: by the early twentieth century the tomato had travelled so thoroughly through French and Italian cooking that an American compiler could file it under the world's kitchen without further comment, though the fruit had earlier been treated with suspicion in much of the English-speaking world.