Robert May produced one of the most extensive and certainly most elaborate cookery books of the seventeenth century in The Accomplisht Cook (1660). He manages to even make some of his egg dishes quite opulent with the use of expensive ingredients like ambergris. This would have been rare but not surprising in upper class circles, at least. It is said that eggs and ambergris was Charles II’s favourite food, but not having the budget or access to the sperm whale secretion, we will skip that recipe for now. Instead, I have adapted for you a set of instructions May presents for an omelette, in this case “according to the Turkish mode,” as well as, one of his recipes for “Eggs in Moonshine.”
I will start with the omelette as the Eggs in Moonshine is kind of desserty, at least according to our current tastes. Because of time and space, I will share that second recipe tomorrow. The modern recipe will be given, then the historic instructions and some explanation of my choices will follow.
Recipe for An Omlet, the Sixteenth Way According to the Turkish Mode
Ingredients
- 50g of fatty bacon or pancetta, diced. (Unsmoked would be the most authentic)
- A dinner roll or equivalent of bread, cut into short strips.
- 100g finely minced venison, pre-cooked as you like. (The period recipe calls for hare or any venison, by which it means any game. Any leftover red meat would work.)
- 50g of chestnuts, roasted, peeled and diced fine. (The recipe says you can also use pistachios, almonds, hazelnuts, pine nuts – called pine-apple-kernels or little pieces of bread roasted as you would chestnuts.)
- Leaves from a sprig of thyme, minced.
- A large sage leaf, minced.
- A very small bunch of curly parsley, minced.
- A grind of sea salt.
- A grind of pepper.
- 4 eggs, lightly beaten.
- 50g of premade or leftover gravy, warmed.
- A generous pinch of nutmeg
- Butter for frying
- A half a lemon cut into rounds.
Instructions
In a large frying pan, on medium heat, cook your bacon until crisp and then set aside in a medium bowl.
In the same pan, adding a little butter if needed, fry your bread strips until coloured and crisp, then set aside.
To the bowl with the cooked bacon, add your venison, chestnuts, parsley, thyme and sage. Season with a grind of salt and pepper each. Mix well and set aside.
Wash your frying pan and return to the heat, turned down to medium low.
Melt enough butter to cover the bottom of the pan.
Pour your eggs into the pan and make an omelette: allow to cook until the bottom is just set and then push around the edges with a spatula. Move the pan around so the uncooked egg on top flows into the spaces you have made at the edges.
Before everything is set, add your venison mixture to one half of your omelette. Fold the other half over but not completely, so as to allow some of the meat to be seen by the diner. Allow to cook a few more seconds to warm your filling.
With a large spatula or turner, carefully move the omelette to a serving plate.
Pour gravy over exposed meat.
Sprinkle over your pinch of nutmeg.
Squeeze out the end lemon slice and place the rest around the omelette.
Place fried bread strips around as well.
Serve.
Historical and Critical Thoughts
Robert May includes twenty-one omelette recipes in his section on eggs. The first thing that should be said about this one and most of them is that they are not his own. An omelette in “The Seventeenth manner, being an Omelet according to the Turkish mode” appears in The Perfect Cook which was published in 1656, four years before May’s book. Many of the instructions in this recipe are copied word for word. However, The Perfect Cook is actually a translation of Le Pâtissier françois (1653) by François Pierre La Varenne. The French book's version is called “Aumelette à la Turque.” La Varenne was a ground-breaking writer who first put to print some of the budding fundamentals of modern cookery in Le Cuisinier françois, a few years earlier. An English translation of his first book - called The French Cook, The Perfect Cook and May’s The Accomplisht Cook were all published by a Nathaniel Brooke at the sign of the Angel in Cornhill, London.
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| A 1678 edition of The Accomplisht Cook |
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| The frontispiece and titlepage of The Perfect Cook, translation (uncredited) of Le Pâtissier françois (1653). Courtesy of the Folger Library online collection. |
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| The frontispiece of the Le Pâtissier françois from the Bibliothèque nationale de France |
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| The original French recipe text from Le Pâtissier françois |
May does act as a bit of an editor for La Varenne’s recipes, both in the original French and as translated in The Perfect Cook. The translation has twenty-five recipes for “Omelets of Eggs, or Pancakes of Herbs,” and May omits and replaces some, sticking to just twenty-one omelettes. The English cook also pares down a number of recipes.
For instance, as seen in the image above, May ends the recipe printed in his book with the somewhat terse: “Roast-meat is the best for this purpose.” He is referring to the option he puts forth in the middle of the instructions: to use raw meat, which you must fry first. The Perfect Cook explains this in more but somewhat redundant detail: “Moreover, if your Hares flesh, or other Venison be roasted, it is so much the better, and you shall then only need to mince and season it, as it hath been aforesaid, and so proceed to make your Omelet, which when it is half fried or baked, add your said minced meat unto it, and so make up your Omelet. And by default of Venison you may make your said Omelet of any other ordinary meat whatsoever.”
That and another option May cuts from La Varenne’s translated instructions lead into the choices I made in my modern version. I had leftover venison cooked with a broth in a slow cooker, so I used that for the filling and I poured over the liquid, thickened to gravy, in the finishing stage. The recipe as seen in The Perfect Cook says: “after which pour some Mutton broth upon your said minced meat, or the gravy of some other roast meats,” while May just says “gravy.” My version was probably too thick - in the North American style – as compared to what they had in mind but I enjoy it that way.
In my venison mixture, I used chestnuts, partially because I had some ready-peeled and roasted left over from Christmas. I chose them over pine nuts and others I had around because, venison and chestnuts are a trusted flavour combination; so, in the end it was both nice and easier. I went slightly off book with some of the rest of that mixture. I salted it as the recipe says but the only spice I used was pepper, the leftover venison had been seasoned before. The period instructions call for a little “fines herbes” in French and “sweet herbs” in English. Today “fine herbs” means chervil, chives, parsley and tarragon but that was not explicitly defined until the beginning of the twentieth century. I went with, again, what I had and what I thought would work: thyme, sage and parsley.
Both the French and English versions of the recipe are explicit about presenting your omelette so the venison can be seen, which I did at least partially.
The eating of this was quite nice in the end, with the omelette itself fading into the background quite a bit. The venison with the sweetness of the chestnuts and the savoury herbs and gravy was the best and most prominent part. The lemon added brightness, the nutmeg smoothness and maybe the sippets or soldiers or strips of fried bread roll would have been more useful if the gravy was thinner.
Tomorrow: "Eggs in Moonshine," which is probably not what you think but another that Robert May almost certainly took from somewhere else.
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