Escape From the French Omelet

Eggs are foundational to my sense of self. Anecdotes from my family indicate that they became my favorite food early on, and they were served to me daily: scrambled, soft-boiled in a Peter Rabbit egg cup, or over medium and draped on toast. I’m 99% certain I’ve eaten eggs every day of my life and will continue to do so, from my homemade egg salad (the secret is smoked paprika) to my husband’s shakshuka or ordering doro wat in Little Ethiopia. It’s impossible to pick a favorite preparation. But I do have a least favorite, and it’s anything traditionally French. As a rather approximate cook, one with an allergy to strict instructions, I find the rigid technique around French eggs stifling. And I tire of the Western food writing canon for banging on about the perfect omelet, which always seems to be a French one.

The ideal omelet, says French tradition, is a little egg pancake filled with tiny, viscous curds. The custardy texture is “baveuse,” as the French call it, or “juicy,” meant to evoke the drool of a dog. It’s an ideal I find kind of gross, to be honest, as well as limiting. For as long as I can remember, I’ve known that food writers were my people. My happiest memories at my unhappiest jobs are of clutching my lunch as I pored through the classics and then the blogs. But always, always, I came across a uniform reverence for those pesky, jiggly omelets. M. F. K. Fisher’s omelet recipe in How to Cook a Wolf, while whimsically written, still aims for the “creamy” French ideal. Julia Child’s “perfect eggs” are also French, and more of a broken custard.

Then there’s the obsessive technique! Jacques Pépin, whose body of work I generally adore, rivals me as an egg’s number-one fan. On his PBS television series, he states, “It is difficult to make a good omelet,” before introducing the French one: He stirs the egg in the pan while rapidly shaking it, pulls up the cooked lip with a knife, and perfectly rolls it before slipping it onto a plate. It’s a pleasure to behold Pépin, all personality and warmth, as he enjoys stirring his egg and beautifully inverting his omelets. He’s like an athlete at his peak. But I was never going to do anything like that at home, of my own free will.

We were surrounded by recipe books from all over the world, but they served less as scripture than as springboards for ideas.

I’m still haunted by the memory of cookbook author and celebrated baker Rose Levy Beranbaum’s description of her omelet trauma at the elbow of James Beard himself in the 1960s: “Beard taught me to make an omelet in a tin-lined copper sauté pan, shaking it back and forth on the burner with my left hand to keep the egg from sticking while stirring the surface in little clockwise circles with my right hand to lighten the egg as it was setting, without breaking through the bottom surface, which also would cause it to stick.” This was stressful to read, let alone live, as Beranbaum continues: “The omelet worked, but the process was not a joyous one and left me feeling very nervous indeed. Thereafter, when I was in the mood for eggs, I limited myself to scrambled or boiled.”

Unlike Beranbaum (or Beard, or any of his peers), I have no culinary training, as should be obvious by now. I learned to cook next to my mother, an academic from Kashmir, who taught herself to prepare food in her thirties. We were surrounded by recipe books from all over the world, but they served less as scripture than as springboards for ideas. The north star in my mother’s kitchen is to wake up identifying the exact combination of flavors you wanted to eat that day, and to create them by sight and sense.

Like my mother, I am generally averse to anyone telling me how I should do things, and the tyranny of the French approach to eggs is exactly why. Because how could something meant to be enjoyable induce so much stress? The pan should be heated to high, over gas; the eggs must be room-temperature; the butter should be cubed to exactly half an inch and ice-cold. Perhaps this is achievable in a professional kitchen, or one without children in it, but my 6 a.m. pre-coffee self prefers breakfast to be simple and loose. The French write their egg recipes with a whole flock of “shoulds” that, to me, undo the accessibility and supposed versatility of a perfect ingredient. Mastery? Perfect? “Should”? Are these words you’d throw around for anything you truly love? Eggs should be eaten as many ways as there are people with fond memories of them.

Mastery? Perfect? “Should”? Are these words you’d throw around for anything you truly love?

And I’d be willing to bet that most people with fond memories of eggs don’t think “custardy mass” when they hear “omelet.” Long before the enshrining of the traditional rolled French omelet in the 19th century, omelets made their appearance in Iran in the 16th century. By many accounts, they were indistinguishable from todays’ kuku sabzi—a bright helping of greens and herbs bound together with egg. This omelet then traveled through the Middle East and North Africa to Europe, giving us tortillas and frittatas, two traditions I find eminently more pleasing and forgiving to make.

My eggs, more often than not, have the heft of a frittata—deli turkey, spinach, and a handful of cheddar cheese, bound together by whatever temperature eggs I had on hand. It’s a classic American diner style, and I am one of its millions of satisfied fans. It’s the kind of fridge-clearing, belly-filling meal I make at the end of a long day and call “breakfast for dinner.” And my own eggy preferences lean into the Indian-ish food I grew up eating: My scramble was an anda bhurji at my Muni Masi’s house in Delhi. I enjoyed countless spicy omelets with my cousins in Pune, and I spooned leftover egg curry over rice at a friend’s home in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

I grew up with omelets that were properly fried in a sizzling-hot pan, paired with carbs, and often doused in ketchup. And contemporary egg-related writing, which I follow closely, shares my enthusiasm for a departure from the Eurocentric model. My egg preferences are enshrined in Tejal Rao’s eggs Kejriwal, Khushbu Shah’s egg curries, and Özlem Warren’s çılbır. Even Nigella Lawson—who is generally on the right side of history—included a terrific masala omelette in her 2001 book Nigella Bites.

But I love eggs so much that I refuse to imprison them in a recipe, and I present my preferred method not as a recipe but as a state of mind: Sprinkle whatever you’ve just diced (red onion, green pepper, a small tomato) into a roomy mug, then mix a couple of eggs in with a fork, like I’ve been doing since I was eight, adding salt and a little ground cumin to taste—no milk. Pour it all into a nice hot pan with a luxurious amount of fat (butter, good olive oil, ghee) until it puffs up like a Dutch baby. Flip it over, slip it onto a soft, toasty roll or a warm paratha (Deep brand, sold frozen, from your local Indian grocery, toasts so well), and add some ketchup—my strong preference is for Maggi Hot and Sweet, because it’s another falsehood that Heinz is the only ideal.

On the side, my preferred beverage pairing: boil some water, pour it over a PG Tips bag, and add a generous splash of whole milk, maybe a little (real) sugar. That, to me, is the perfect combination of morning flavors. Of course, I rarely get to enjoy it, because most mornings I’m summoned to line cook for my family—who, unlike me, prefer a soft scramble. I whisk their eggs with a little half-and-half, stir them over a low heat until they’re softer than I’d like, and serve them up with a hunk of baguette. This is probably what I get for birthing my children in the Western hemisphere. But, more often than not, I hear my son pipe up: “Could you throw a little ketchup on there?” and I smile in victory.