Omelettes I have loved
How often do you eat omelettes?
For a good few years, my Sunday night meal was a simple baveuse omelette on toast, no adornment save a few scrapings from the nearest piece of cheese and four quick turns of the pepper mill.
I thought this normal. I figured the rest of the known world punctuated their weeks with omelettes thus. When too full for a proper meal - omelette. When too tired or lazy to cook - omelette. When stocks are depleted or the shops are all closed - omelette. When wanting something luscious and lascivious but funds won’t stretch to seafood and champagne - omelette. When feeling bourgeois and poetic and wanting a simple spring lunch under a blossoming tree in the garden - omelette.
I find the omelette compelling, you see; from the piety of the whisked egg, pulled into ribbons in a warm pan, to its golden folds just set, then turned out onto a plate, or onto buttered toast, and then the simplicity of needing nothing more than a fork with which to portion it into the mouth, I find it all as pleasing a meal as I can imagine preparing.
Apparently, I am, if not alone, then not in broad and fervent company when it comes to this. In recent years, trips with friends, holidays with family and new partners, and life outside my own life have taught me that many do not feel how I feel about omelettes.
I come from a long line of omelette cooks, you see. My grandfather, in his retirement, became a devoted and studious student of cooking techniques. I am specific about that description as he was certainly not a daily, nor indeed especially regular cook of meals. He was a fanatic though when it came to correct and proper technique for things. He would take himself to the old-fashioned grand hotels, not grand like the Ritz, but grand like the Eastbourne Grand, the Hythe Imperial, and The Toorak in Devon, and he would enrol on cookery classes. He’d return to my grandmother with a tall chef’s hat embroidered with the hotel’s name, some new implements, and a folder full of laminated instructions for one thing or another. It was due to this that he knew foolproof methods for choux buns, he could raise and maintain a souffle of quite some renown, and he could boil and glaze a carrot in a reduction of butter and orange juice so that it might be said that his vegetables appeared french polished they gleaned so on the serving platter, but over and above it all he knew how to make an omelette, and omelette that is that had no suggestion of colour on its rump but that was set to perfection through its seamless curved body. If TikTok has turned people on to Japanese Omurice, they should have been front and centre in my grandfather's kitchen in 1994, they wouldn’t have believed their eyes. Considering it now he most likely would have been a TikTok sensation had he not passed away a good decade before its invention. With his faultless croquembouche or his towering millefeuille set to the catchy oop-pah-pah of Max Bygraves, I reckon he might just have gone viral.
My Dad inherited this omelette obsession and knack. My memory of my grandfather's omelettes is of them being an option at lunch or dinner, but my dad was a morning omelette fancier of quite some regularity. He always kept a smaller-than-average omelette pan with which he would knock out perfect little omelettes on Saturday or Sunday mornings throughout my childhood. Almost every weekend one morning would be bacon and eggs, the other omelettes, and it is hard to find fault with that weekly rhythm. No doubt influenced by his own sojourns in the grand coastal hotels of the British Isles, he was more of a filler of omelettes than my grandfather before him. If a scrap of sausage or ham or smoked salmon or ripe and ready cheese was to be found inside the fridge, he would no doubt commander it for omellete-ing with. He omelettes with gay abandon to this day. There are doubtless few more enticing propositions than spending the weekend with him and being at the front of the queue for his ritual worrying of eggs in his little cast iron frying pan for your breakfast. He is rarely an omelette filler nowadays; more likely now is a slither or two of smoked salmon alongside the golden half moon of perfect omelette, and that suits me just fine.
For a period in my youth, we took rather lavish holidays in quite far-flung places. I mention this not as a segue into egg preparation or omelette-adjacent content from around the world, but instead, for the abiding memory I have from most of these hotels throughout southern Europe, Greece, the Caribbean and even the Indian Ocean, of the omelette station - a stalwart of the high-end international hotel chain vernacular - where a chef, no doubt trained to operate in kitchens at the highest echelons of haute cuisine, is reduced to taking orders from a long line of sunburned holiday-makers for a dizzying variety of combination omelettes of every creed, colour and filling. For the record, my order was always cheese and ham, a restraint I was smugly proud about when carrying the plate back through the dining room; but others gave their omelettes both barrels and one has to acknowledge their chutzpah.
At any rate, this omelette abundance and excellence between the ages of four and twenty-four left me with the feeling that omelettes are the epitome of restrained sophistication. I still feel that now. Yet in the decade and a bit since I’ve found myself with friends, lovers, chefs and acquaintances and offered up a cheeky omelette at a moment I thought particularly opportune only for their lips to purse, their noses to twitch, and their eyes to narrow at the thought before they politely decline, at best, or roundly query why on earth I would offer them an omelette when any other option available would be much more appealing than rubbery old slab of egg.
I don’t know where you sit on the question of omelettes, I’m not a mind reader, but I hope you might consider giving one a go. Here’s how I proceed most weeks:
Slice some bread, pop it in the toaster and set it toasting. Take a frying pan no larger than 20cm in diameter and place it over a low heat. Pop a knob of butter in its base.
Take two eggs, hopefully from a bowl or such-like on your countertop, and not from the fridge, but if you are refrigerating them, be a cove and give them a chance to come up to room temperature before you use them.
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