You put a pot of water on to boil, you crack two eggs into a silver mixing bowl. You drag the heavy cast iron pan out of the bottom drawer and pop it onto the stove. You add a splash of water to your mixing bowl of eggs and start to whisk, then add a pinch of salt and whisk some more. You slide your feet into your brown leather clogs and head down to the vegetable garden, your wet bikini in one hand and a knife in the other. You throw your bikini over the clothes line, being careful not to wet your white sheets that lay over the line, just about dry from a morning in the hot sun. Back up the wooden steps into Papa’s vegetable garden, you head straight for the young Swiss chard swaying gently in the afternoon breeze, slicing a few leaves. A pluck of parsley — both flat-leaf and curly, why not? — and a handful of basil on your way out. The smell of the just-plucked basil wafts around you as you wander back up the stairs, into the kitchen, to the boiling pot of water. The hypnotic scent of basil always reminding you of the chef who suggested submerging your face into a gastro of basil in the cool room if life on larder got all a little too much, and about Patience Gray writing of the nourishing qualities of inhaling herbs:
“Pounding fragrant things — particularly garlic, basil, parsley — is a tremendous antidote to depression, but it applies also to juniper berries, coriander seeds and the grilled fruits of the chilli pepper. Pounding these things produces an alteration in one’s being — from sighing with fatigue to inhaling with pleasure. The cheering effects of herbs and alliums cannot be too often reiterated.” — Honey From a Weed, Patience Gray
A spoon of salt, a wash of the greens. On with the fire under the cast iron pan and in with a knob of butter. As it starts to melt, the eggs get another whisk before being poured into the just-melting salted butter and almost in the same movement, the greens get dunked into the bubbling, salty water. A crack of pepper over the setting eggs before a spatula holds the eggs as you tip the fry pan, allowing the raw egg to run onto the bottom of the hot pan.
You realise your white shirt isn’t buttoned up correctly because you were so eager to get to your omlette after your cold shower after a sun-drenched morning on the beach. You adjust and return to the task at hand: a midday omelette. The music that’s playing is your over-played playlist, French Chill, listened to with the idea that the language will seep into you through the sounds and words of Stacey Kent and Madeleine Peyroux and Eartha Kitt, and Duo Gadjo and their Hot Friends.
The omelette starts to set and you use your spatula to roll it over onto itself. It sits in the pan for a moment, with the heat turned off, while you pick the greens up out of the boiling water and pop them into a bowl. You crack a new bulb of garlic, the cloves so plump you only need half of one. You squeeze the water from the greens now that they’ve cooled slightly and drink the salt-spiked water straight out of the bowl, before returning the squeezed greens and showering them with a grate of garlic and a drizzle of olive oil.
As Elizabeth David would say, “slide the omelette onto your waiting plate”, and pop the greens on to sit pretty next to the roll of plumped eggs. The parsley two ways gets chopped, the basil torn, and the generous sprinkling of herbs makes you smile. A crack of pepper, one more olive oil drizzle and you wonder, how could it be any better?
Well, Elizabeth David may suggest by adding a glass of wine to the occasion. She’s not wrong, I suppose. Something white and chilled would be quite nice. She also wasn’t wrong when she said: “As everybody knows, there is only one infallible recipe for the perfect omelette: your own”.
I like this quote. There are endless ways to cook an omelette, and endless opinions, but the truly important thing is the joy you get from finding your way. If you made one everyday for a week, well you’d soon find out what that is. In saying that, reading about how to cook an omelette has to be one of my favourite topics in food writing — it’s always written with such conviction, often with seemingly the smallest of adjustments, but can vary drastically. My mother’s fluffy French, soufflé-style omelette is worlds away from my father’s Spanish style-omelette spiked with chopped fresh chilli, as is Julia Child’s from Jacques Pépin’s. Tamar Adler notes in her wonderful The Everlasting Meal Cookbook that an omelette with three eggs is better than an omelette with two, but that three eggs can be a heavy breakfast and therefor, an omelette is more of a lunch or dinner affair. Gabrielle Hamilton serves hers with fried oysters, so I assume she too would be a more omelette-for-lunch-or-dinner type of woman, though I wouldn’t judge if someone were partial to fried oysters in the morning.
Anything eggs in the morning always makes me think of mornings with Lean Timms’ in her cosy, candle-lit kitchen. Lean is a dear friend, an incredibly talented photographer, and one of those women who makes the world a better place, in so many ways. And she knows how to live. Visiting Lean in her Canberra house, there’s always a bowl of fresh eggs on the kitchen table that we’ll eat on a cool winter’s morning over candle light. She’s a host like no other, making you feel like you’ve stepped into another world from the minute you step onto her porch, smell the Le Labo Santal candle burning and lay eyes on the perfectly wild floral arrangement sitting at her front door that she would’ve foraged from here and there. Next minute you’ll be out the back in her vegetable garden, barefoot, glass of wine in hand, plucking whatever’s growing. A full sensory experience I tell you. Dinner might be radish and nettle butter and chestnut soup by the fire, or come summer, sausages, salad and potatoes that we dig up from her garden under the light of a torch about 3 minutes before they hit the boiling water.
I read back over my diary from about this time last year, and find these words on eggs: This week the chickens we bought six weeks ago when I landed here at Camont, a property run by food writer and cook Kate Hill in South-West France, laid their first eggs. The experience of watching them every day, helping them settle in with daily food scraps and nettle tea to make them feel at home, to get them to a point where they feel comfortable to lay eggs or in their minds, bring up a little family of chicks, has been truly remarkable. I now understand on a very different level what is behind this simple food I have cracked, whisked, scrambled, poached, boiled since I was three years old. I’ll be forever grateful to these six laying ladies for giving me this insight, for teaching me the ways of a food we so easily take for granted, reaching for one after the other from the cardboard carton they’re packaged up in. Yes, the first thing I ever made was scrambled eggs at the age of three in Suva, Fiji whilst both my parents were sick in bed with dengue fever.
And, though whilst nothing to do with omelettes or eggs, while we’re on the topic of truths that Elizabeth David told, let’s just pop this here: “To eat figs off the tree in the very early morning, when they have been barely touched by the sun, is one of the exquisite pleasures of the Mediterranean.” How nice.
And speaking of figs, I’ve been embroidering an old linen French sheet that I picked up in a warehouse somewhere in central France and dedicated 1.5 kg of my weight allowance coming back to Australia to. The sheet has been mended in a few places, giving clues to it having been a treasured item in someone’s household for quite some years. A favourite of the embroidery so far are the two fig leaves — I plucked a few from the tree in the backyard over Christmas and traced them onto the sheet then embroidered them in a lovely green cotton using the backstitch technique I learned from artist and embroider Sarah Espeute whilst working with her and her pieces in Marseille last year. More on Sarah next week — excited to be publishing a piece on her story and her work, with images I shot during a morning with her at her Marseille atelier in September, just before I left the city. Swoon galore.
Well that was lovely to write, stepping into worlds that are lovely to be in; I hope it was lovely to read. Wishing you a week of abundance and mornings or days that allow for omelettes and your favourite (over-played) playlists.
A joy to have this time with you.
H. X
So many lovely memories in the post about something so simple that can also be complex, the omelette.