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A Fine Receipt for a Savoury Omelette

A savory omelette made with eggs, butter, herbs, salt, pepper, and optional chorizo.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and butter 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 Fine Receipt for a Savoury Omelette

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggs

  1. Break the eggs and beat them until thin enough to pass through a fine sieve.

  2. Continue beating until perfectly smooth.

Cook and finish

  1. Melt the butter in a small omelette frying pan.

  2. Pour in the beaten eggs and cook until the edges rise and firm up.

  3. Slide the omelette onto a warm plate and fold it over.

  4. Sprinkle the unfilled side with minced herbs, salt, and pepper.

  5. If needed, hold a salamander over the unfilled side to remove any rawness.

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. Egg + buttertop 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 the structure of the omelette as they cook, forming its body.
Butter
Coats the pan so the eggs release cleanly and add richness to the flavour.

The step that matters

Beating the eggs until smooth. Thorough beating breaks up the whites and yolks evenly, so the omelette cooks to a uniform texture without streaks of unset egg.

“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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