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Curled Omelet
(Frittata in riccioli) Boil a bunch of spinach and rub it through a sieve. Beat two eggs, season with salt and pepper and mix with them enough spinach to make the eggs appear green. Put the frying pan on the fire with only enough oil to grease it and when very hot put in a portion of the eggs, moving the frying pan so as to make a very thin omelet.
When well cooked, remove it from the frying pan and repeat the operation once or twice in order to have two or three very thin omelets.
Put these one over the other and cut them in small strips that are to be browned in butter adding a little grated cheese. These strips of omelet, resembling noodles, form a tasty and attractive dressing for a fricandeau (veal stew) or a similar dish. 61
A thin spinach frittata sliced into ribbons and crisped in butter, used as a garnish rather than a dish in itself. The whole thing hinges on getting the omelets thin enough to roll and cut like tagliatelle.
- QuantitiesTwo eggs and one bunch of spinach would give a garnish for a small number of servings; the recipe specifies no yield. "A bunch" is not a fixed measure, and in any case you will not need all the puree, only enough to colour the eggs distinctly green.
- The spinach must be dryBoil, drain, then squeeze the spinach hard in a towel before sieving. Wet puree loosens the egg and the sheets tear when you try to lift or roll them.
- Sieve or blenderRubbing through a sieve was the usual route to a smooth puree in 1919. A small food processor does it faster, but push the result through a sieve anyway to catch stems, which show up as tough flecks in a paper-thin omelet.
- Pan and heatAn 8-inch nonstick or well-seasoned skillet, wiped with oil, over medium-high. The pan should be hot enough that the egg sets on contact, so tilting spreads it into a crepe-thin sheet; too cool and it puddles into something scrambled.
- "When well cooked"Means set through, not browned, and it happens in under a minute per sheet. There is no flipping here; the omelet is thin enough to cook from one side.
- Cutting the stripsThe recipe simply stacks the sheets and cuts them into small strips; rolling the stack loosely before slicing across at about a quarter inch is one way to do it. Let them cool first, since warm egg sticks to itself and the strips will not separate.
- BrowningToss the strips in foaming butter for a minute or two, just to firm the edges, then add the cheese off the heat. Grana or Parmigiano; longer in the pan and the ribbons go leathery.
- FricandeauThe book's gloss of "veal stew" is loose. A fricandeau is a larded piece of veal braised and glazed with its own liquid, but the garnish works over any braise with a good sauce, and over broth.
Frittata in riccioli is literally "omelet in curls," and it belongs to a long Italian habit of turning a thin egg sheet into something that behaves like pasta. The same trick produces the fine shreds of frittata cut into broth in central and southern Italy, and it is a cousin of the batter-scraps and egg strips used to garnish clear soups across Europe. The recipe comes from Maria Gentile's Italian Cook Book (1919), a book often taken to have been aimed at American households curious about Italian cooking but working with American ingredients; on that reading, pieces like this one suggest what the period valued in a made dish: a garnish that looked deliberate and cost almost nothing. Spinach as a colouring agent rather than a vegetable in its own right is characteristic of that older repertoire, where green pasta, green sauces and green gnocchi all leaned on sieved spinach for tint as much as flavour.