Baked Omelet
1 tablespoonful melted Crisco 4 eggs 8 tablespoonfuls milk 1/2 teaspoonful cornstarch 2 tablespoonfuls water Salt and pepper to taste Beat eggs well, add milk and beat again, add Crisco, seasonings, and cornstarch mixed with water. Turn into a Criscoed fireproof dish and bake in moderate oven fifteen minutes. Serve hot.
A plain baked egg dish from a cookbook written to sell shortening, so the fat is named as a brand. It is closer to a crustless custard than to a folded omelet, and the only thing that will ruin it is overbaking.
- Watch the set, not the clockThe book gives no temperature; "moderate oven" is conventionally read today as around 350F, at which fifteen minutes should just set a shallow dish holding this quantity, while a deeper dish takes longer. Pull it when the center is barely firm and still trembles slightly, since residual heat continues to cook it and an overbaked egg mixture weeps and turns spongy.
- Moderate ovenNo temperature is given in the book; the usual modern equivalent is about 350F. Oven heat in this period was often judged without a thermometer, so err toward the lower end rather than rushing it.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, introduced in 1911 and reformulated since. Melted butter or a neutral oil works identically here; the flavor will be better with butter.
- "Criscoed" dishSimply means greased. A "fireproof dish" in this period is an ovenproof earthenware or glass baker, the ancestor of the modern gratin dish or pie plate.
- Tablespoonfuls of milkEight tablespoons is half a cup.
- The cornstarchA half teaspoon slaked in two tablespoons of water is likely acting as a stabilizer rather than a thickener, helping keep the eggs from separating and weeping as they set. Mix it smooth before it goes in; the recipe adds it last.
- SeasoningAbout a quarter teaspoon of salt for four eggs is a reasonable reading of "to taste." Season the liquid, not the surface, since the dish is not stirred once it goes in the oven.
- YieldFour eggs in a shallow dish serves two as a main course at breakfast or lunch, three or four alongside toast, bacon, or a stewed fruit.
This comes from one of the promotional cookbooks Procter & Gamble commissioned after launching Crisco in 1911, when hydrogenated vegetable shortening was a genuinely new substance and cooks had to be persuaded it could replace butter and lard in every part of the meal, including something as delicate as eggs. That accounts for the single tablespoon of shortening beaten into a mixture that hardly needs it, and for the odd instruction to grease the dish with the same product. The recipe itself belongs to an older tradition: baked, milk-loosened egg dishes were standard household fare well before the twentieth century, valued because they demanded no skillet technique and no timing at the stove, only an oven at a steady moderate heat.