“Omelets have been a part of French cuisine for hundreds of years. One of the earliest texts about French cooking is a single large chapter in the manuscript called Le Ménagier de Paris. Written around 1393, Le Ménagier has two recipes for alumelles, thought to be an early reference to flat omelets. In 1653, François Pierre de la Varenne published his Le Patissier François with 22 recipes for sweet and savory aumelettes, many of which are almost identical to recipes published three centuries later.

The place of the omelet today in a French meal is not as a breakfast dish, but as an entrée (a first course) or a dessert. Add a little extra milk and sugar to a basic omelet preparation and you have a custard. Add a little flour and the omelet becomes a crepe batter. (The omelets we are concerned with in this article are those made primarily with eggs.)

Early omelets were served flat or rolled. Nowadays, they can be flat, rolled, folded, stacked, or souffléed. They can be savory or sweet. The filling can be mixed with the eggs or rolled inside the cooked eggs or spread across the top of the finished dish.

In former times, it was recommended that the frying pan used for omelets be only used for that purpose. Today, with the availability of nonstick surfaces, this is less important. More important is that the shape of the pan allows for easy removal of the finished omelet, usually by sliding it out of the pan.”

For the entire article, go to http://www.hertzmann.com/articles/2005/omelettes/

quiche
thanx in advance