Omelette
egg dish
An omelette (omelet in American English; see spelling differences) is a dish made from eggs (usually chicken eggs), fried with butter or oil in a frying pan. It is a common practice for an omelette to include fillings such as chives, vegetables, mushrooms, meat (often ham or bacon), cheese, onions or some combination of the above. Whole eggs or egg whites are often beaten with a small amount of milk, cream, or water.
History
It is believed that omelettes originated in ancient Persia. According to Breakfast: A History, they were "nearly indistinguishable" from the Iranian dish kookoo sabzi, a Persian version of a frittata.
According to Alan Davidson, the French word omelette (French: [ɔm.lɛt]) came into use during the mid-16th century, but the versions alumelle and alumete are employed by the Ménagier de Paris (II, 4 and II, 5) in 1393. Rabelais (Gargantua and Pantagruel, IV, 9) mentions an homelaicte d'oeufs, Olivier de Serres an amelette, François Pierre La Varenne's Le cuisinier françois (1651) has aumelette, and the modern omelette appears in Cuisine bourgeoise (1784).
Alexandre Dumas discusses several variations of omelette in his Grand dictionnaire de cuisine. One is an omelette with fresh herbs (parsley, chives and tarragon), and another is a variation with mushrooms that Dumas says may be adapted using green peas, asparagus, spinach, sorrel or varieties of truffles. The "kirsch omelette" (or rum omelette) is a sweet omelette made with sugar and liquor, either kirsch or rum.
“Omelette” enters the record as egg dish. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Omelette and dish can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20129. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1393, 1651 and 1784.
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This entry incorporates text from “Omelette” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.