Last week in Sechelt, at the Thrift Shop, I found a copy of Elizabeth David’s An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, a collection of her essays on food and drink. The price: $1. My introduction to her books was via Summer Cooking, a book on the shelf in the kitchen of a house I lived in one beautiful winter, a Maclure house on the sea in North Saanich. I loved her tart observations about everything from soup to nuts and her recipes were inspiring. Over the years I accumulated many of her books. I can’t remember where I first read the title essay from An Omelette and Glass of Wine but her description of the ideal omelette was imprinted on me forever.
What one wants is the taste of the fresh eggs and the fresh butter and, visually, a soft bright golden roll plump and spilling out a little at the edges. It should not be a busy, important urban dish but something gentle and pastoral, with the clean scent of the dairy, the kitchen garden, the basket of early morning mushrooms or the sharp tang of freshly picked herbs, sorrel, chives, tarragon.
Yesterday we went for a walk in damp air, hoping to find chanterelles in our favourite spot. And Reader, we were not disappointed. Not an abundance, no, but enough to clean and tear gently into pieces, cook briefly in butter, and strewn over a nearly-set omelette, with a snipping of chives, tarragon, and a few crumbles of aged Cheddar cheese. That was our supper, by the fire, after a chapter of To the Lighthouse, with a glass of crisp white wine. Because, as Mrs. David admitted,
And although there are those who maintain that wine and egg dishes don’t go together I must say that I do regard a glass or two of wine as not, obviously, essential but at least as an enormous enhancement of the enjoyment of a well-cooked omelette. In any case if it were true that wine and eggs are bad partners, then a good many dishes, and in particular, such sauces as mayonnaise, Hollandaise and Béarnaise would have to be banished from meals designed around a good bottle, and that would surely be absurd. But we are not in any case considering the great occasion menu but the almost primitive and elemental meal evoked by the words: “Let’s just have an omelette and glass of wine.”