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Omelette with Cordial
(Paris.) Beat 5 eggs and 1 ounce sugar, add a tablespoonful of Kirsch, melt 2 ounces butter in a pan, pour in the eggs, cook until set. Roll it on a dish, fill with 2 tablespoonfuls of apricot jam, mixed with a glass of Kirsch. Dust with sugar, glaze brown, and serve at once.
A sweet French omelette, folded around warm apricot jam and finished under heat until the sugar caramelises. It takes under ten minutes, and the whole thing hinges on not overcooking the eggs.
- Weights to volume1 ounce sugar is about 2 tablespoons; 2 ounces butter is 4 tablespoons. That is a generous amount of butter for five eggs — half of it will do in a nonstick pan, with the rest whisked in at the end if you want the richness.
- "A glass of Kirsch" is vagueThe tablespoonful in the eggs is clear enough. The glass in the jam is not: "a glass" in recipes of this kind might mean anything from a liqueur glass (1 to 2 tablespoons) to a wineglass (roughly 2 fluid ounces). Start with a tablespoon, since the filling should stay thick enough to hold a roll.
- KirschClear, unsweetened cherry brandy distilled from whole fruit, stones included, which gives it its faint almond bitterness. Not to be confused with the sweet red cherry liqueurs sold under similar names; a sweetened substitute will make the dish cloying.
- Cook until barely set"Cook until set" here means the underside is coloured and the top still glossy and soft. A sweet omelette continues to cook as it is rolled and glazed, and an egg that is fully firm in the pan will be dry on the plate.
- Warm the jamCold jam stiffens the omelette and tears it as it rolls. Loosen the apricot jam with the Kirsch over low heat first, so it spreads in one pass.
- GlazingThe original probably assumes a salamander or other heated iron passed over the top. Dust heavily with sugar and pass under a preheated broiler for 30 to 60 seconds, or use a blowtorch. Watch it — the jam scorches faster than the sugar caramelises.
- PanAn 8- or 9-inch pan with sloping sides. Anything wider spreads five eggs too thin to roll cleanly.
- YieldTwo as a dessert, one as a substantial one. Serve the moment it is glazed, as the recipe directs; it softens and weeps as it stands.
Sweet omelettes belong to an older order of French cooking in which eggs were as much a dessert as a savoury, and the flamed or glazed omelette — omelette aux confitures, omelette soufflée, omelette norvégienne — is often said to have had a place on nineteenth-century restaurant carte. Kirsch itself comes from the Rhine valley and the Black Forest rather than Paris, and its pairing with apricot was a standing convention of the period's pastry work — the same combination underlies the apricot glaze brushed over countless tarts and gâteaux. The instruction to "glaze brown" points to equipment now largely gone from home kitchens: the salamander, a flat iron heated in the fire and held above the dish to caramelise sugar from the top down.