Skip to main content
Main

Omelet, Plain

A simple omelet made with butter, eggs, 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 ↓

Omelet, Plain

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Melt the butter in a frying pan.

  2. Beat the eggs until frothy, then add salt and pepper.

Cook the omelet

  1. Pour the beaten eggs into the frying pan as soon as the butter begins to frizzle.

  2. Scrape the bottom of the frying pan with a tablespoon, ensuring to cover all areas.

  3. Continue scraping until about two-thirds of the mixture is lumpy and the rest is liquid.

  4. Lift the frying pan from the heat to slightly slacken the cooking.

  5. Push the omelet into a semicircle shape in the frying pan.

  6. Hold the frying pan at a slant in front of the fire until the omelet is fully set.

Serve

  1. Slide the omelet onto a hot dish using an egg slice and serve.

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
Set into a structure that forms the body of the omelet as they cook.
Butter
Coats the pan so the eggs release cleanly and adds rich flavour.

The step that matters

Lift the frying pan from the heat to slightly slacken the cooking. Eggs cook quickly on direct heat and can turn rubbery or brown. Lifting the pan slows the set, keeping the omelet tender while the surface remains moist and the centre stays softly set.

“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