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Omelette Au Caviar

A French omelette filled with caviar, parsley, shallots, lemon, and cayenne, served with fried bread snippets and crispy parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Omelette Au Caviar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. In a bowl, mix caviar, parsley, shallots, and lemon juice.

  2. In a pan, warm the mixture with butter and add cayenne pepper.

Make and serve the omelette

  1. Prepare an omelet with eggs, green onions, and seasoning.

  2. When the omelet is nearly done, place the caviar mixture in the center. Fold the omelet over the filling.

  3. Serve immediately. Garnish with fried bread snippets and crispy parsley.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set into the structure of the omelette as they cook, holding the filling inside.
Caviar
Adds a salty, briny flavour and a burst of texture to the filling.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the filling warm gently and carry flavour.
Shallots
Add a mild onion-like sharpness that softens and sweetens when warmed.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich caviar and butter.

The step that matters

Warming the caviar mixture. Caviar is delicate and heat can make its eggs burst and toughen, so the filling should be only gently warmed in the butter and not cooked hard.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, caviar, parsley, shallot, butter, lemon, pepper):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Cucumberfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, caviar, parsley, shallot, butter, lemon, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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