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Omelet

A thin omelet coated with beaten egg and bread crumbs, fried until golden and served with mint sauce, parsley, and brown gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Omelet

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the omelets

  1. Make three thin omelets using three eggs each.

  2. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, chopped parsley, and sweet leek or eschalot.

Assemble and fry

  1. Cut each omelet in half and spread them in the pan.

  2. Rub with beaten egg and sprinkle with bread crumbs.

  3. Fry until golden brown.

Serve

  1. Serve with mint sauce, crisped parsley, and brown gravy.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together759 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Pepper + leektop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together965 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Leek + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together279 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set into thin omelets that form the structure of the dish.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, golden crust on the surface when fried.
Beaten egg
Binds the bread crumbs to the omelet and helps the coating brown.
Sweet leek or eschalot
Adds a mild onion-like aroma and savoury flavour to the omelets.

The step that matters

Fry until golden brown. Bread crumbs and egg brown quickly through the Maillard reaction, so heat that is too high scorches the crust before the omelet is heated through. Moderate heat sets the eggs and browns the coating evenly.

Swap the leek

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

  1. Shallotfits about as well
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Chivefits about as well
  4. Leekthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, pepper, parsley, bread, butter. 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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