“Eggs Unscrambled,” by Jeffrey Steingarten, was originally published in the May 2003 issue of Vogue.
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There are thirteen ways to cook an egg,” said Didier Elena, standing in the kitchen. “Oeufs sur le plat, oeufs frits, oeufs pochés, oeufs mollets, oeufs cocottes, oeufs moulés, oeufs à la coque, oeufs brouillés, oeufs durs, omelettes, and oeufs froids,” he continued, by which he meant baked, fried, poached, soft-boiled (five to seven minutes), coddled, molded, very soft-boiled (three minutes), scrambled, and hard-boiled, plus omelets and cold eggs enrobed in a meaty, crystalline aspic. He reached thirteen adding two dishes entirely dependent on eggs—soufflés both sweet and savory and the airy, eggy sauce known as sabayon.
“In truth,” Didier pointed out, “there are 422 ways to cook an egg.” Most of them are variations on the central thirteen. Didier recommended Le Répertoire de la Cuisine, by Louis Saulnier, originally published in Paris in 1914, a compendium of more than 6,000 names and brief verbal recipes that sum up the state of fancy French cooking (now known as fancy Freedom cooking) 90 years ago. I own this book but have never mastered it, and so the thing that has impressed me most is the ability of the French (more properly, the Freedom People) to think up 6,000 different names for anything. And yet, even after inventing 422 egg dishes, the French (ditto) never attempted, perhaps never even imagined, the beautiful “1,000-year-old eggs” in Irving Penn's amazing photograph on the opposite page. These are Chinese, of course, and are made by coating duck eggs in a paste of salt, wood ash, lime, and black tea and burying them among rice husks in huge ceramic jars for 100 days. I guess they just look 1,000 years old. Thousand-year-old eggs can be delicious. Peel, quarter, and serve with a dipping sauce of soy, vinegar, rice wine, and minced ginger.
Me, I had nothing grander on my mind than the simple omelet. I had admitted to Didier that I needed to start at square one, that I had never achieved an acceptable omelet. And finally I was man enough to face up to it. Saulnier lists 85 types of omelets, ranging from Américaine, Andalouse, and Archiduc to Turque, Vichy, and Victoria. They differ only in what you put inside them and sometimes what you put on top and around them. Among the most tempting-sounding is the omelet Brillat-Savarin, stuffed with diced woodcock and black truffles and surrounded by a strong game gravy. And the Durand, in which the eggs are first mixed with mushrooms and artichoke bottoms that have been warmed in butter; at the end, the omelet is rolled around asparagus tips and surrounded by a tomato glaze.
My aspirations were more modest. All I wanted to do was learn to make the simplest little omelet. “Omelet-making is at once very simple and very difficult,” Saulnier tells us. “The whole process should be done speedily, and requires long practice to attain perfection.” That's what they all say. I needed hands-on instruction, and Didier Elena seemed the perfect choice. At age 31, chef de cuisine at the restaurant Alain Ducasse (at the Essex House hotel in New York City), one of the city's finest establishments, Didier is a masterly cook with a rigorous classical training. I telephoned, and he agreed to my plan. I was to visit the Ducasse kitchen a week later.
Meanwhile, I reviewed my cookbooks. Omelets can be sweet or savory, flat or wrapped into an oval. The savory oval kind was what I had in mind. This is often known as just a plain omelet, and it's made with beaten eggs cooked in butter, then formed into a nice, compact shape.
The ideal plain omelet is tender, light (almost fluffy), moist (but not runny), and naturally sweet. My omelets have been tough and rubbery, sometimes dense, dry, and slightly bitter from excessive browning. The official plain omelet should be browned not at all or just a little.
Most cookbooks, the best basic French cookbooks—Julia Child, Madeline Kamman, Richard Olney—have you start with a very high flame, melt some butter, pour in the beaten eggs, and either scramble them for a while (following various techniques and patterns for scrambling) or let them solidify slightly into a flat pancake, then delicately lift its edges to allow the uncooked eggs to flow underneath. Finally, you gather the eggs or roll them up or fold them in thirds. To get the resulting packet out of the pan, there's an official technique requiring you to smash your fist against the pan's handle. None of these techniques has worked for me, ever.
Some omelets are made lighter by separating the yolks and whites, beating up the latter, and folding in the former. Some people add cream to the beaten eggs, or milk, little chunks of butter, or water. Most advise you to use a smoothly seasoned iron pan, which you should never wash and never use to cook anything but omelets.
At around this time, I talked with TV producer Geoffrey Drummond, who lent me an ancient collectsible—the famous omelet show from Julia's early The French Chef series on WGBH in Boston. Julia demonstrates how to cook a perfect little omelet without using any tools—just by shaking a pan in a magical way. I tried it once. I wonder if it's bad for your stove to let a panful of molten eggs drip inside and bake onto all the parts. She makes it look like so much fun.
I began to find the entire subject of eggs endlessly fascinating. Being a haphazard and sloppy researcher, I read reams of information about eggs that turned out to have little relevance to the omelet problem. One or two of the reams were nonetheless extremely useful:
- Brown and white eggs are the same on the inside. An egg's color depends on the breed of the hen. Araucana hens from South America lay eggs in lovely shades of pastel blues and greens. Some are pink. Windfall Farms at the Union Square Greenmarket here in Manhattan sells such eggs, though they nearly always run out by the hour I feel it appropriate to stroll over to the market. They act as though they enjoy running out. I've read about dark-yellow eggs but never seen one. Why would anybody settle for white or brown?
- Shirley Corriher, in her excellent book Cookwise, writes that a chicken's egg will be the same color as her ears. Although I have doubts that chickens have ears, I am eager to test Shirley's notion at the earliest opportunity. She says you first have to brush aside the feathers.
- Do you know the best way to open a raw egg? I do. Gently bring it down against your counter, side first. Then turn it over and open it with your thumbs. No need to look around for the rim of a bowl or the edge of your counter, both of which will just drive shell fragments inward and dribble egg everywhere.
- Chairman Mao did not invent the sinister expression “You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.” The Freedom People did. At least by 1859, they were using the proverb “On ne saurait faire une omelette sans casser des oeufs.”
- You can test the freshness of an egg by laying it on its side on the bottom of a bowl of cold water. If it simply lies there, it is very fresh. If it tilts upward at about a 45-degree angle, it is a week old. If it floats to the top, it is probably rotten. Why? The empty space inside the flatter end of an egg, known among poulterers as the air cell, gets larger as time goes by. An egg shell is perforated with 6,000, 8,000, or 17,000 microscopic pores (depending on whom you read). As the egg loses moisture and some of the carbon dioxide that was dissolved in the white part, oxygen seeps in and the air cell grows larger; this causes that end to float. Why don't I believe that anybody has actually counted all those pores under a microscope, one by one?
- Your chances of getting a case of salmonellosis from eating an egg are extremely small. The federal Centers for Disease Control tell us that in the Northeastern United States, where most salmonella-infected chickens can be found, one out of 10,000 eggs is infected. How many eggs do you have to eat before you have a 50 percent chance of eating an infected egg? Using statistical methods vaguely remembered from college, I believe the answer is 6,931 eggs, nearly an egg a day for 20 years. The danger comes from eggs cooked soft or not at all. You would need to eat 6,931 undercooked eggs. Undercooked chicken is a thousand times more likely to be infected.
- If a hen is allowed to keep her eggs after she lays them, she stops after she has amassed a certain number, then waits for her little baby chicks to hatch. By removing her eggs, we can make her lay continually. In our modern egg factories, most laying hens live in cages that measure just under eight inches on a side. One worker can take care of 100,000 caged hens but only 15,000 hens roaming freely on the floor of a barn or building. The population of the average commercial flock is 1,000,000 laying hens. Me, I buy only free-range eggs.
- Eggs are among the most nutritious foods on earth because (as Harold McGee points out in On Food and Cooking) they are designed and destined to be foods. They sustain and nurture the chick the way milk and seeds support the calf and the seedling. But nutritionists have been ambivalent about the dangers of eating eggs. Egg yolks contain lots of cholesterol. A portion of this is converted into serum cholesterol—cholesterol in our bloodstream—when we eat an egg. The American Heart Association advises us to keep our cholesterol intake below 300 milligrams a day. The yolk of a large egg contains about 213 milligrams of cholesterol; extralarge eggs contain even more. So the AHA would limit you to about two omelets a week and a largely vegetarian diet the rest of the time.
- This is bad advice. Here's the thing. If your serum cholesterol is low, why worry about how much cholesterol you eat? If it's over 220, by all means eliminate every source of cholesterol from your diet, or take a pill. I prefer pills. They enable me to exercise my freedom to eat. You'd have to be crazy to do otherwise. In any event, the science behind the American Heart Association recommendation may be outmoded; the more we learn, the more we see how drastically individuals vary in their reaction to what they eat.
- Storing eggs in those individual egg-shaped cavities in your refrigerator door accomplishes two things: It ensures that your eggs will be flung about 20 or 30 times a day (in my case, 100 times a day), and it removes whatever protection from refrigerator odors the egg carton provides.
- That which we call a chicken descends from a Malaysian jungle bird. Maybe it was Indian. It spread far and wide because of the fantastic popularity of cockfighting, not because people liked eating chicken salad. The arena in which a cockfight is held is called a cockpit. There was a cockpit in a basement across the street from my house when I moved back to Manhattan many years ago. Then gentrification gradually pushed most traces of Hispanic culture out of our neighborhood.
- Eggs are graded for quality according to USDA standards. Only grades AA and A can be found in supermarkets; grade B eggs are used industrially. Eggs are graded soon after they are laid, and so grading has nothing to do with freshness. Eggs are graded by “candling” them—shining a bright light through them and looking for blood spots (harmless) and cracks, for the thickness and opacity of the white, and the firmness of the yolk. These last two are vital in fried and poached eggs. For scrambled eggs and omelets, the less expensive grade A eggs are just fine. Freshness is still important for flavor.
- Though I would Gladlys have spent another week reading about eggs, book learning seemed unlikely to help me make an omelet. The time for my lesson with Didier had arrived.
- It was early afternoon, seven hours before dinnertime, and yet the kitchen at Ducasse was a hive of energy and diligence. Didier—tall, blondish, and well fed—took a black iron pan having fairly high, curving sides, set it near the edge of the hot, flat metal cooktop, filled it halfway with coarse salt, and every so often shook it back and forth. After a half-hour of this, Didier emptied out much of the salt and vigorously rubbed the interior of the pan with a kitchen towel. (As I discovered later, at home, this procedure produces a fine, clean, smooth cooking surface.)
Using olive oil instead of butter in honor of his native Monaco, Didier moved the pan to a slightly hotter section of the cooktop while he vigorously whisked two and a half eggs (free-range from Four Story Hill Farm in Pennsylvania) with a little salt and pepper and additional oil for a half-minute, then dribbled some egg into the pan to test its temperature. When the dribbles almost immediately seized up, Didier went to work, pouring in all the egg at once, shaking the pan back and forth with one hand, and, holding a fork flat against the bottom of the pan, frenziedly scrambled the eggs in small circles, creating small clumps, better known as curds, as the pan's overall movement ensured even cooking of the whole. He let things settle for a moment, then began rolling up the eggs, also away from him, with the back of his fork. The eggs did not roll in one piece, the way you would roll up a carpet, but had to be gentled along, often in several places along the line. Now and then, Didier squared both ends of the roll to give the omelet what he and his teachers would consider the most elegant shape. When only an inch remained to be rolled, Didier angled the far rim of the pan against a tilted, warmed plate and inverted the omelet onto it.
Here the haute cuisine came in handy. Didier laid a clean kitchen towel over the omelet, pushing and squeezing it here and there. What emerged was an omelet of ideal and epitomic shape—straight, proudly puffed, about six and a half inches long and two and a half inches wide, with squarish ends and neither a speck nor drop of oil or liquid egg anywhere around. We soon discovered that it was light and sweet and very good to eat.
Could I put my omelet lesson into practice? Or would I fail again?
“A shoddy workman blames his tools,” I hummed ironically as I entered the the J. B. Prince Company on East Thirty-first Street in Manhattan in search of an omelet pan just like Didier's. I always blame my tools. At a minimum, I use my shoddy work as an excuse to enlarge my collectsion of toys. I emerged from the shop with three iron pans, one cast from alloy and very expensive, two pressed from sheet steel and very cheap, none just like Didier's, but all 22 centimeters across the top, eighteen centimeters across the bottom, and four centimeters high or a little more, which Didier had told me is standard for a one-person omelet pan. This comes to 8.7 inches wide, 7.1 inches across the bottom, and just over 1.6 inches high.
As I know from my 20-year-old American cast-iron frying pans, it can take a year before a pan is so well seasoned that nothing will stick to it. But I didn't have a year before cooking my next omelet. So I took my three new pans, caused them to be washed meticulously, coated them with vegetable oil, put them in a 350-degree F. oven, inverted on a baking sheet, for an hour, and then let them cool overnight in the oven. I should have waited. The next day, the eggs bonded tightly to the metal and could be neither folded nor rolled nor, indeed, actually extracted from the pan or even scraped from it. It was the perfect time for Didier's salt trick. As soon as I have a free moment.
Instead, I turned to my small, nonstick pan and put it over a medium flame as Didier had done. It was then that good things began to happen to really good people. My omelets turned out better and better.
So long as the pan was nonstick and small enough that the eggs would not spread out and immediately clump up, and as long as the heat was set to a good, firm medium, I found it increasingly difficult to produce a really poor omelet. As most of the scientific books tell us, coagulating protein at lower temperatures produces more tender clumps; adding a little water or cream makes an omelet tenderer still. I think the main reason the old recipes called for a furious flame was to prevent sticking.
And maybe the endless practice has helped as well. I now make omelets just for fun, when I have a free minute, using various combinations of the methods in the recipe I've written below. I even occasionally play around with very high heat; but then I have to hurry as if my life depended on it, not my favorite mode. And now, if I can just get my hands on a woodcock and some strong gravy…
- 1 to 2 T very good, fresh, unsalted butter, preferably softened at room temperature 3 large or extralarge chicken eggs, any color
- 1/4 tsp. fine salt
- Two grindings of fresh black pepper
- 1 T water or cream, optional
- 1 T cold butter
Special equipment: a thick, nonstick frying pan measuring 9 inches across the top or 7 inches across the bottom; a one-to two-quart bowl; a dinner fork.
- Put the pan over very low heat. Add 1 to 2 T of the soft butter and let it melt slowly and completely.
- Meanwhile, crack open the eggs into the bowl. Add the salt and pepper, the optional liquid, and, if you wish, the remainder of the 2 T of soft butter. (Harold McGee says that added liquid makes for a more tender omelet because it slows clumping by separating the proteins in the white; Didier showed me a trick in which he beat one egg with several tablespoons of water and produced a large, fluffy omelet—with a very pallid taste.)
- Beat the eggs vigorously with the dinner fork for about 30 seconds and about 40 strokes. You can use a whisk, but nearly everybody warns against overbeating and thinning out the protein.
- Meanwhile, raise the heat under the pan to medium or medium-high and, swirling around the melted butter from time to time, heat it just to the point of browning. (This makes the butter wonderfully aromatic. Its temperature will be a little high for nice, slow cooking, but if the fire is set only to medium, the pan will immediately cool down.) Give the eggs another whip or two and immediately pour them into the pan.
- Agitate the eggs. There are many ways of doing this. Try them all. It's fun! If the eggs don't clump as quickly as they should, turn up the heat a little—the cooking of the eggs should take no more than 30 or 40 seconds. But it's much easier to start at a lower temperature.
- a) As soon as the eggs spread out over the bottom of the pan, hold your fork flat against the pan and sweep in broad circles, starting at the outside and moving in smaller and smaller circles toward the center. In about 20 seconds you will have made four or five spiraling sweeps, and the eggs will be ready for the next step. Or,
- b) Let the eggs settle in the pan for a moment. As soon as they begin to coagulate around the edges, take a wooden spoon and, starting somewhere around the edge, pull a cooked section to the center (which will allow uncooked egg to flow to the outside). Then move around the circle by about 60 degrees and pull the next section in. Do this quickly so that by the time all the eggs have been transformed into very moist, somewhat large clumps in about 20 to 30 seconds, you will have gone around the circle twice. All the time you should be moving the pan back and forth. This is the method of Mme. Romaine de Lyon, the famous old omelet restaurant in Manhattan, where co-owner John Benson gave me a five-omelet lesson two weeks ago. Or,
- c) Follow Didier's (and, incidentally, Escoffier's) method: Immediately begin scrambling the eggs by moving your fork (held flat to the bottom of the pan) very vigorously in small circles as you move the pan back and forth to keep redistributing the eggs. Once or twice go around the outer border of the eggs to prevent overcooking at the edges. Stop when the eggs are still quite moist and before they separate into large clumps.
- Now it's time to form the omelet, by rolling or folding it. To roll the omelet, with the back of the fork, push the near edge of the circle of coagulated eggs about a quarter of the way across the pan and pause for a few seconds. Then, with the back of your fork, carefully roll the near edge away from you, a half-inch at a time. The eggs may not roll evenly along a straight line. Don't worry. Just roll the eggs a segment at a time. Stop when you're about an inch or so from the far edge.
- To fold the omelet, some people can do it entirely by shaking the pan. But even at Mme. Romaine de Lyon they simply take a spatula and bring the near third of the omelet over its center and then proceed to invert it. Whether folding or rolling, hold the pan at a 45-degree angle as you set its far rim against a dinner plate held, also at an angle, in your other hand. Shove or shake the omelet so that its far edge hangs over the rim of the pan and onto the plate. Quickly tilt the pan nearly all the way over the plate to invert and release the omelet with its flap underneath.
- Lay a clean kitchen towel (or a paper towel) over the omelet. With your hands, make it nicely plump and straight while sponging up any stray liquid (butter or uncooked egg or water squeezed out of the white by overcooking).
- Spear the cold butter with a fork and run it over the surface of the omelet to make it glisten and taste even better.
- Serves one, maybe one and a half.