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Omelette a LA Portuguaise

A Portuguese-style omelette colored with spinach and tomato juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Spinach and tomato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,350 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Omelette a LA Portuguaise

Ingredients

Directions

Make the omelets

  1. Make two omelets using 6 eggs and part of the butter.

  2. Color one omelet with spinach juice and the other with tomato juice, then pour into the pan.

  3. Make two more omelets with the remaining eggs, using 4 egg whites and 2 yolks for one, and 2 egg whites and 4 yolks for the other to create different colors.

Serve

  1. Serve the omelets on a hot dish immediately.

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. Spinach + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,350 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  3. Butter + tomatotop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Egg + spinachtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,323 recipes

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

  5. Butter + spinachtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,583 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set into the omelet structure and provide most of its body and richness.
Butter
Adds fat for flavour and helps keep the omelets tender and from sticking.

The step that matters

Serve the omelets immediately. Eggs keep cooking from residual heat after leaving the pan. As they cool they firm up and lose their softness, so serving them on a hot dish straight away keeps them tender.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Asparagusfits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, spinach. 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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