Frittata is an egg-based Italian dish, similar to an omelette, crustless quiche or scrambled eggs, enriched with additional ingredients such as meats, cheeses or vegetables.

History

The Italian word frittata derives from friggere and roughly means 'fried'. This was originally a general term for cooking eggs in a frying pan (or skillet in the US), anywhere on the spectrum from fried egg, through conventional omelette, to an Italian version of the Spanish omelette, made with fried potato. Outside Italy, frittata was seen as equivalent to "omelette" until at least the mid-1950s. Frittata has come to be a term for a distinct variation that Delia Smith describes as "Italy's version of an open-face omelette". When used in this sense, there are four key differences from a conventional omelette: