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Apricot Omelet
Cut 6 preserved apricots into dice, and heat up in a little fruit juice. Beat up 5 eggs, add pinch of salt and 1 tablespoon sugar. Melt in an omelet pan or frying pan 2 tablespoons Crisco, when hot pour in beaten eggs and stir over quick fire till they commence to thicken, put in the prepared apricots, then shape quickly into an oval form by folding the ends. Allow the omelet to acquire a golden brown by putting it in the oven, turn out on to a hot dish, dredge with sugar and serve at once.
A sweet folded omelet of the sort that closed a light supper or stood in for dessert. It comes together in under five minutes, so have the apricots warm and the serving dish hot before the eggs go in.
- The hinge: stop stirring earlyStir only until the eggs begin to set into soft curds, then stop and let the base form. Sweetened eggs catch and brown faster than plain ones, and an omelet stirred to the point of dryness will not fold cleanly or absorb the fruit.
- Preserved apricotsThis means apricots put up in syrup — a can or jar of halves in light syrup is the direct equivalent, drained, diced, and warmed in a few spoonfuls of their own syrup. Dried apricots are not a substitute without stewing them soft first.
- CriscoThe book is a Crisco promotional cookbook, hence the shortening. Two tablespoons of butter gives a better flavour for a sweet omelet; clarified butter if you want the higher smoke point.
- "Quick fire"Medium-high heat on a modern burner. The pan should be hot enough that the eggs sizzle on contact but not so hot the butter browns before they go in.
- Finishing in the ovenThe recipe gives no temperature: a hot oven for a minute or two, just long enough to puff and colour the top. A broiler two or three inches from the element does the same job faster and is easier to watch.
- Pan sizeFive eggs want an 8- to 9-inch pan. Anything wider and the omelet spreads too thin to fold around the fruit.
- The final dredgeSugar dusted over the hot surface will melt and gloss. Sprinkling before the oven or broiler rather than after will give a more caramelised finish, though the recipe as written dredges once the omelet is turned out.
- YieldTwo generous servings, or three as a light course. It does not hold — serve straight from the pan as directed.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which reached the market in 1911; that explains why a vegetable shortening turns up in an omelet where a nineteenth-century cook might well have been expected to write butter. The sweet omelet itself is much older and thoroughly French in descent — the omelette aux confitures, filled with jam or preserved fruit, folded, glazed with sugar and sent to table at once, is often said to have been a familiar inexpensive entremets in Victorian and Edwardian English cookery. Preserved apricots were a natural choice: home canning and commercial fruit in syrup put them within reach year-round in a way fresh apricots, with their short season and poor keeping, never were.