Omelette

Ingredients

• 150 gr Cooked salami
• 150 gr of roasted veal
• four eggs
• salt
• butter
• oil
• a handful of grated parmesan cheese

What to prepare

• an iron skillet
• a fork
• a plate

Procedure

Grind the cooked salami and the roasted meat.

Beat four whole eggs with a fork, salt and add a handful of grated parmesan cheese, the ground meat and pour in a pan where you have put oil and butter cooking on high heat.

Keep the pan moving until the edges of the omelette rise.

When it seems cooked, turn the omelette over with a dish as wide as the base of the pan and put back on the heat, having added again some butter and oil.

Once cooked, turn the omelette over again and serve hot.

Curiosities

This tasty omelette recalls a legend which was narrated by Vigiu, one of the mètayers working on our farm when I was still a child, a man possessing great wisdom, so witty yet patient with us children.

At sunset, sitting on the wall with him and others in the courtyard, I used to listen carefully and in silence while he told us old tales using a measured and calm rhythm, with timely pauses during the most thrilling parts of the story, modulating his voice according to the different characters of the story, which generally were witches, wizards, famished wolves, pirates and thieves.

At times the moon made fantastic designs in the barnyard, bizarre mazes, swift and soundless flights, which together with his words, made me shiver with fright. And without anybody seeing me, I used to draw nearer to him, without losing a word of what he was saying.

Among all the tales he used to narrate, there was one that is still well known to many people from Alba. The story is associated to an enormous precipice that descends to the Treiso area and where there are seven gullies that keep crumbling all the way down.

That cliff was called Rocche dei sette fratelli (Rocks of the seven brothers) and this is the legend that still lives and that fascinated me so much.

Many years ago, seven brothers lived in that area, six brothers and a sister, all vigorous workers so soundly attached to their land yet quite uncaring toward any other responsibility or task.

That day they all were working in a very vast and beautiful grazing land, which was their pride and they asked their sister to prepare an omelette with meat for lunch (the tricky omelette).

It was Friday, “fast-day”, in which christians never ate meat (and even if I was still a child I knew it well because the nuns of my kindergarten had already told me and I didn’t like to eat the cod fish they used to cook for us, to substitute meat), and the girl reminded her brothers, trying to convince them not to eat the omelette which was considered blasphemous, but nobody listened to her.

So she prepared the omelette and served it, but the six hungry brothers hadn’t yet cut it that the meadow caved in dragging in all seven of them.

Nobody ever found out what happened to the boys; the girl saved her life by hanging on a steep peak that can be seen still today; the “Rocks” are still there, colorless, steep and towering to admonish sinners, who today as yesterday, remain inconsiderate for many other things and not only for religious recurrences such as “fast-day”.

Crediti Foto: jeffreyw