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Friar's Omelet
Peel and core 1 pound cooking apples, and boil to pulp with little water and sugar. When nearly cold and 1 tablespoon Crisco and 1 or 2 well beaten eggs. Crisco a pudding dish and coat thickly with breadcrumbs. Pour in mixture and cover thickly with more breadcrumbs. Cook in oven for 3/4 of an hour. A little lemon peel can be added if liked.
A baked apple pudding in the charlotte family, written in the compressed style of a promotional cookbook — one word is missing and the oven temperature is left entirely to the cook. Both are easy to supply.
- The missing word"When nearly cold and 1 tablespoon Crisco" should read "add." The fat and the beaten eggs go into the apple pulp once it has cooled.
- Cool the pulp firstThis is the hinge. Hot apple will set the eggs on contact and leave you with threads of scrambled egg through the pudding. Let it come down to just warm, no more than blood heat, before the eggs go in.
- CriscoAn all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, and the reason this recipe exists. Modern Crisco has been reformulated and may behave slightly differently; unsalted butter is a better-tasting substitute in equal measure.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, for the specified 45 minutes will set the custard and brown the crumb coating without scorching it.
- Cooking applesOne pound is about three medium apples. Use a variety that collapses — Bramley, or Granny Smith at a pinch — since the recipe depends on a smooth pulp rather than slices.
- Sugar is unmeasuredThe original says only "sugar." With a tart cooking apple, 3 to 4 tablespoons is about right; taste the pulp while it is still on the heat.
- BreadcrumbsDry crumbs, not fresh, for both the coating and the top — fresh ones absorb the moisture from the apple and go pasty. Buttering the dish before crumbing helps them adhere and release.
- Dish and yieldA 1-quart pudding basin or baking dish is the right size. Serves four, warm, with cream or a spoonful of custard.
- Lemon peelRead this as finely grated zest, added to the apples as they cook. Pared strips of peel would need to be fished out before the eggs go in.
The name has nothing to do with omelets in the modern sense; "omelet" in older English cookery could mean almost any egg-set dish, sweet or savoury, and this one is a close cousin of apple charlotte — fruit pulp baked in a crust of buttered crumbs. Friar's omelet appears under that name in British household books through the nineteenth century, and the monastic attribution is decorative rather than documented, of a piece with such names as friar's chicken and poor knights of Windsor. Its appearance here, in a book built around a year of daily menus, reflects a specific commercial purpose: A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco after its 1911 launch, so butter and suet were systematically replaced with the new shortening throughout an otherwise conventional repertoire. The single tablespoon of Crisco in a pound of apples tells you how little the fat mattered to the dish and how much it mattered to the publisher.