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Spanish Omelet
Prepare a Spanish sauce and spread half of it over the omelet after it has been removed from the oven. Fold over, slide onto a platter and pour the remaining sauce around it.
This entry assumes you already have two other recipes in hand — a plain French omelet and the book's Spanish sauce — and covers only the assembly. Read it as the finishing step rather than a standalone method.
- The missing omeletNo egg quantity is given; the entry covers only the assembly and presumably refers back to a plain omelet elsewhere in the book. As a working substitute, three eggs per omelet, beaten with a little water or cream and a pinch of salt, cooked in a 9- or 10-inch pan in about a tablespoon of butter.
- "Removed from the oven"The recipe assumes the omelet is finished in the oven, though it gives no temperature; a moderate oven would suit. A modern cook can skip the oven entirely and set the surface under the broiler for thirty seconds, or simply cook the omelet more slowly on the stovetop.
- What Spanish sauce means hereIn American cookbooks of this period it is generally a tomato sauce cooked down with onion, green pepper, and often mushrooms, sometimes with a little stock or a spoonful of flour to thicken, rather than the brown espagnole of French kitchens — though the book's own Spanish sauce recipe would settle it.
- Sauce consistency is the hingeThe sauce must be thick enough to sit on the eggs, not run off them. Reduce it until a spoon drawn through leaves a brief track; a thin, watery sauce will weep through the fold and collapse the omelet on the platter.
- Fold, don't rollWith filling inside, a single fold is all the eggs will take. Loosen the far edge with a spatula, fold toward you, and let the omelet roll out of the pan onto the platter seam-side down.
- Warm the platterEggs and tomato sauce both lose heat fast on a cold plate. Hold the serving dish in a low oven while you cook, and have the sauce hot before the eggs go into the pan — the omelet takes under three minutes and will not wait.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity. A three-egg omelet of this kind serves one generously or two modestly at breakfast; multiply by cooking omelets one at a time rather than enlarging the pan.
The "Spanish" omelet of American cookbooks has little to do with the Spanish tortilla, which is a thick potato-and-egg cake served in wedges. The name attached instead to the sauce: tomato, onion, and sweet pepper, a combination that American writers of the period sometimes labelled Spanish or Creole with little consistency, and whose spread was helped along by the growing availability of canned tomatoes in the later nineteenth century. The Spanish omelet became common breakfast fare — a dish that let a kitchen turn out something colorful and filling from a few eggs and a ladle of sauce kept hot on the back of the stove. The egg cookery of the period leaned heavily on made sauces to give variety, and a cook who had one good tomato sauce going could dress omelets, toast, and leftover meat from the same pot.