Skip to main content
Main

A Plain Omelet

A simple omelet made with eggs, butter, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

A Plain Omelet

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Break the eggs into a bowl and beat them briskly.

  2. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Cook the omelet

  1. Melt the butter in a small omelet pan over medium heat without browning it.

  2. Remove any scum and pour the beaten eggs into the hot butter.

  3. Keep the pan moving over the heat until the mixture thickens.

  4. Let the pan rest over the heat for about a minute.

  5. Slide a broad knife under one half of the omelet and fold it over the other half.

  6. Trim the edges neatly and hold the pan to brown the underside.

  7. Invert the pan over a hot dish and serve quickly with the browned side up.

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. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  3. Egg + peppertop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together50,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Egg and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 50,580 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Coagulate when heated to set the omelet into a tender, cohesive structure.
Butter
Coats the pan and adds richness and flavor while keeping the eggs from sticking.

The step that matters

Keep the pan moving until the mixture thickens. Constant movement over heat keeps the egg proteins forming small, tender curds. If the eggs sit still, they set in large, tough layers and can overcook or brown unevenly.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes