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Meat or Fish Omelets

A savory omelet made with meat or fish, spices, and eggs, cooked in butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Meat or Fish Omelets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove all skin and sinew from the meat or fish and cut it small or pound it to a paste.

  2. Mix in spices and coarse sea salt to taste.

Cook and serve

  1. In a buttered frying pan, cook the mixture over medium heat until it begins to brown.

  2. Pour beaten eggs over the mixture or mix the meat with the eggs before adding them to the pan.

  3. Cook until the eggs are set, then serve hot, garnished with herbs, pickles, or sliced lemon.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Meat + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,594 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  5. Meat + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,703 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Bind the filling and set into a tender, custard-like omelet around the meat.
Cold meat, fish, game, or poultry
Provides the main filling, adding savory flavor and substance to the omelet.
Butter
Greases the pan and adds richness and light browning to the omelet's surface.

The step that matters

Cooking the mixture until it begins to brown. Browning the meat before adding eggs builds savory flavor through the Maillard reaction. Overcooking the eggs, however, makes them rubbery, so cook only until they are just 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.

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