Beat 4 yolks of eggs; add 6 soda crackers crushed fine, salt, pepper, 1 teaspoonful of grated onion, 1 tablespoonful of butter and 1 cup of milk. Beat up well; add the whites beaten stiff; put into a well-buttered baking-dish and let bake in a hot oven. Serve at once.
A puffed baked omelet in the soufflé manner, thickened with cracker crumbs rather than flour. The original gives no pan size, temperature or timing, so the notes below fill those in.
- The hingeFold the stiff whites into the yolk mixture in two additions and stop while streaks are still faintly visible. Beating them in, as a literal reading of "beat up well" might suggest, collapses the foam and you get a dense custard instead of a risen omelet.
- "A hot oven"In this period that means roughly 400–425F. At 400F a 1‒quart buttered dish needs about 25 minutes, until the center is just set and the top is browned and domed.
- Soda crackersA plain, unsweetened cracker; modern saltines are the closest substitute, though period soda crackers were often larger. Six crush to roughly 1/4 to 1/3 cup of fine crumbs. They absorb the milk and do the binding work a flour panade or bechamel would; graham or any sweetened cracker will not work here.
- The butterMelt it and let it cool slightly before adding, or it will not disperse through the cold milk. Reserve a little for the dish itself, which must be generously coated to the rim so the mixture can climb.
- Grated onionGrate on the fine side of a box grater and include the juice. A teaspoon is a background note, not a flavor; onion powder is not a substitute for the moisture it contributes.
- Soaking stepNot in the original, but useful: let the crumbs sit in the milk five minutes before combining with the yolks. Dry crumbs folded in at the last minute stay gritty.
- Yield and timingServes two generously, three modestly. "Serve at once" is literal — it begins to sink within a couple of minutes out of the oven, so have the plates ready.
Cracker-thickened baked eggs turn up throughout American cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the soda cracker was a cheap, shelf-stable pantry staple and was widely used as a binder in dishes from fish balls to puddings. Calling the dish "French" fits the era's habit of attaching a nationality to egg dishes that rose in the oven rather than being folded in a pan; the French omelette soufflée is the obvious analogue, though it would have been thickened with flour or with nothing at all. That looseness is characteristic of a book like this one, where the point of a day-by-day calendar of dishes from various nations was novelty and variety on an ordinary household budget rather than fidelity to any particular kitchen abroad.