I am not a huge watcher of fiction TV, but I confess I've become a fan of The Sopranos in syndication (during its original run, I saw three episodes -- all on free HBO weekends...) I see it as an absurdist comedy; as much as it has been hailed as this deep commentary on American life, I think it makes more sense viewed as an R-rated sitcom (although on A&E they blur out a lot of bits, to be sure).
Anyway, I recently watched the episode where Tony kills Ralph Cifaretto, in Ralph's kitchen. One of the really prominent things about this series is how much food plays a role. I'm sure this was part of the whole deep-psychology-Dr. Melfi pseudo-therapy strain of the show, since food is a really deeply-ingrained part of our psyche and also a very important part of most ethnic and family cultures. I haven't kept score but everybody seems to be eating and drinking and otherwise consuming in most episodes.
So, just before Tony and Ralph get into the fight that ends up with Ralph dead on his kitchen floor, Ralph offers to make Tony some eggs. Ralph, in the middle of the discussion about their dead race horse Pie O' My (another food reference!), claims the secret to eggs is adding sour cream. He's making these eggs as the fatal fight finally erupts.
It just shows you what a food loon I am that this is what I remember best from this scene. (Have you ever made the tomato sauce just the way they did in the gone-to-ground sequence in Godfather? I have! I also own a copy of Lobscouse and Spotted Dog, which is a topic for another day.)
So - sour cream - in eggs? I'd never heard of such a thing. On top of eggs, sure! In the egg mixture? How does that work?
Now, most omelet recipes call for milk or cream, about a tablespoon per egg or less, well-beaten in. I've always assumed this was to rearrange the protein strings in the egg, using the egg as a binding agent, especially since the more you beat this mixture smoothly the more consistent an omelet comes out. Sour cream, though, I wondered about: since, by definition, it has more curds than cream or milk, wouldn't that make the egg mixture cook up lumpy? If, as Ralph is suggesting, in scrambled eggs, does that make the texture better, or the flavor tangier, or both?
I consulted the usually-reliable Harold McGee (On Food and Cooking) and was interested to learn he doesn't even mention dairy in his discussion of omelets. He has the following definitions: "Scrambled eggs are omelets made from yolks and whites mixed together, and are therefore a good fate for fragile, runny lower-quality eggs." I'm with him there -- I just don't cook scrambled eggs at all, we get the best jumbo eggs we can get and when I cook eggs qua eggs, 9 times out of ten it's a simple omelet with milk and I let the bottom set (no scrambling). McGee, of course, advocates low heat and patience for scrambled eggs, which is the exact opposite of what I learned about scrambled eggs from my grandmother and mom: for them, this was a very quick way of getting a mass of eggs on the table in the morning. Crack the egg into a hot pan and whisk for a minute and you're done. For omelets McGee says, "If good scrambled eggs demand patience, a good omelet takes panache -- a two- or three-egg omelet cooks in less than a minute. Escoffier described the omelet as scrambled eggs held together in a coagulated envelope, a skin of egg heated past the moist tender stage to the dry and tough, so it has the strength to contain and shape the rest." I'm with this definition, for sure, and that container aspect of it is another reason this is the default egg preparation in our house -- for one thing, you can cut the omelet up into discrete kid-friendly bites, plus the cold egg can be stored and snacked on later (try doing that with scrambled eggs -- yuck.) And, I think an omelet's safer -- well-cooked, there's nothing runny about it so no salmonella risk. But I can't cook an omelet in one minute, at least not with the kitchen stuff we have. I have a very good medium-sized omelet pan that does one and two-egg omelets nicely and can be made to cook a three-egg omelet, with or without fillings. But it's not cast iron, nor do I apparently have sufficient gas power to get the pan hot enough. So my omelets usually take three minutes.
Which gets us back to Ralph Cifaretto's eggs. I've experimentally tried adding sour cream twice recently, largely because we had sour cream leftover from the lasagne of a few weeks ago, and I don't do a lot of cooking with sour cream, so it's still on hand. Once with a scramble, the second time beaten into an omelet.
With the scramble, it just didn't mix in with the eggs very well -- I got a thin mixture of undercooked egg-cream mix and some odd-looking egg curdles. Not very appetizing to me. I will say the dog loved it, though.
This morning I tried sour cream beaten into an omelet mixture, and it came out better. The mixture was very 'heavy' in the pan, and the omelet took about a minute or so longer to really cook through. It did not puff up a lot, a la Julia Childs' great omelets (my hero!) although if I'd stuffed it and then cooked it longer it seems like it would make a very good envelope for fillings, as it were, since it was heartier when being flipped over.
I'm not sure I'm going to repeat this experiment, but I will ask my readers herein if they have any experience with using sour creams as an egg mixture. (McGee has a long section on egg-liquid mixtures of various sorts, but mostly as custards and creams. It's completely essential reading, since as with any complicated egg usage - meringues and so forth -- a little underlying theory is very very useful in guiding tricky practice. But not for omelets.)
