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Summer is high season for omelets — any dish that takes under two minutes and can enfold fresh herbs and vegetables is just about perfect. If you have trouble making an omelet, you’re not alone. According to chef André Soltner, 50 percent of trained chefs can’t make omelets properly. While there is not unanimous agreement about what "properly" means, there are some common pitfalls that lead to Trouble in Omelet City.
• You may read in a perfectly respectable cookbook that all egg dishes should be cooked at low temperature. This is true EXCEPT for omelets. Cook omelets at medium-high heat — not enough to burn the butter in the pan, but enough to cook a two-egg omelet in under 90 seconds.
• Don’t use too small a pan. For a two-egg omelet, use a 7-1/2" to 8" pan. In one of his earliest cookbooks, called How to Eat Better for Less Money (1954), James Beard said it is better to make a series of individual omelets than to make one big one that has to be cut and served. "You can’t make a good omelet if you have too much egg mixture in the pan," he said. Beard had a sauté pan devoted to the task; he never washed it, just wiped it out between omelets.
• Don’t flip an omelet like a pancake. After pouring eggs into the hot pan, keep them moving with a fork in a circular motion without scraping the bottom of the pan. When the top is settled but still a bit runny, add pre-warmed filling (if desired), tilt the pan, and fold the omelet in half as you slide it onto a warmed plate. (It’s all in the wrist, as they say.)
• Don’t use too much filling. Two or three spoonfuls is enough for any omelet; you can pour the rest beside the finished omelet on the plate.
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For centuries in old Europe, the night before Midsummer Day (June 24) was a wild time of revelry, bonfires, water purification rites, fertility charms, love divinations, and incantations to the Sun. It was the most important annual festival in pagan Europe, and even after it was Christianized as the birthday of St. John the Baptist, many elements of the ancient rites remained. To this day, in Ireland and parts of Scandinavia, bonfires burn all night on Midsummer Eve.
The festival coincides, of course, with the astronomical summer solstice, the northern hemisphere’s maximum amount of daylight and shortest nights. We think of the solstice as the official beginning of summer, but in ancient agricultural societies, it marked the midpoint of the growing season, which began with spring planting and ended with the harvest.
This year, the summer solstice falls on June 21, in the dark of the New Moon. In our latitude, we have 15 hours and 18 minutes of daylight, the longest of the year. A bonfire that night, or on Midsummer Eve two nights later, will be just the thing to light up the night. We’ll cook a few hot dogs or s’mores, offer our incantations to the Sun, and ponder the poignant but indisputable fact that now the days will be growing shorter. Just when we think we are approaching the peak of summer, Mother Nature is already cruising toward fall.
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