Last night I was in the market for a simple, filling dinner. What ho! In skimming through Mastering, I was seized by Julia’s mention that omelettes take “less than half a minute to make,” making them “ideal for a quick meal.”

I don’t know how a book from 50 years ago read my mind, but there you go.

I used the first of two omelette recipes, L’omelette Brouillée (Scrambled Omelette.)  The recipe calls for heating butter in a pan until it is very hot – hot enough that the ubiquitous melted-butter foam subsides but before the butter has begun to brown – and then pouring in eggs  for a very quick and dextrous cooking moment.

What could go wrong with an exercise that should take less than a minute?  Haha, this practically requires military precision, so a better question might be, what could go right?

I made a few mistakes. I didn’t chop the cheese up before the butter was in the pan starting to melt, and so I couldn’t get the eggs in the pan before the butter started to brown.  I didn’t chop it fine enough, so the cheese didn’t melt on contact but sort of wadded up and slowed down the egg cooking.  And I don’t think I got the jerking-pan motion described in the recipe quite right, because while the eggs did not stick to the pan, they didn’t really move or roll the way the recipe predicted they would.  (That last isn’t so much a mistake as it is room for improvement.)

Despite the mistakes, I did enough right that the product was edible.  The eggs were cooked.  The outside was brown and slightly crispy.  The cheese was, for the most part, melted.  It didn’t fall apart like most of my efforts at omelettes, pre-Mastering.

I expected that the egg mixture would contain dairy of some sort, as I’d always been taught to do that.  I assumed that French tradition was the source of the conventional wisdom, but I was wrong.  (The scrambled eggs, a separate recipe, did include milk or cream, added at the end to halt the cooking process.)  Which means that while I chose to throw cheese into my omelette, this dish could just as easily be made with meat ingredients, as long as the cooking fat wasn’t butter.

I tested this theory by actually making a chicken omelette for lunch today.  I made a few changes, starting with using canola oil in place of butter.  Canola oil burns and smokes much hotter than butter does, so in this case I estimated that waiting about 5 minutes for the oil to get that wavy, rivery look would be about right.

This time I also had my filling chopped AND pre-heated by microwaving – I took 2 ounces of the leftover Poulet Rôti, roughly chopped it and put it in a small dish with a teaspoon of that special sauce, and nuked it for two minutes, until it was steaming, popping hot.

Hot pan, hot oil, hot filling.  The eggs were beaten and seasoned.  I had one try at the lightning mechanics under my belt, so I felt a little better prepared for my second attempt.

It went like this (a synopsis of what the recipe instructs):

-pour two beaten eggs into superhot oiled pan, stirring relentlessly
-when eggs are apparently half-cooked, pour on hot chicken
-give it a few seconds, then engage patented MtAoFC pan-jerking method until scrambled omelette sort of folds itself into a lump on the far side of the pan
-give it ten more seconds to brown on the underside, then slide it off onto a warmed plate

It all took under a minute, from the time the eggs hit the pan until the omelette skidded onto the plate.  And it looked much better than my first offering, which just goes to show that I learned something!

I found the oil easier to cook with than the butter – possibly because I underestimated the impact of cooking in butter that had already started to brown.  The motion required to move the omelette as the book directs is part intuition and part brute force, but ultimately with practice one can get a feel for it.  This recipe is, like all the recipes I’ve tried so far, something of a cop-out from the kashrut standpoint, but things will get much harder down the road (have you read the Boeuf Bourguignon recipe?) so I am appreciating every bone this book throws my way, for the time being.

And learning to be the master of egg preparations large and small is no insignificant feat, that’s for sure.