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Variations of Puffy Omelet
No. 1: Serve Puffy Omelet on a bed of creamed spinach. No. 2: Spread well-seasoned, slightly-thickened, canned tomatoes in the fold of the omelet.
No. 3: Put the omelet together with creamed oysters, creamed chicken, or creamed veal.
No. 4: Put the omelet together with cheese sauce, creamed spinach, peas, asparagus, or onions.
These are four finishing treatments for the book's Puffy Omelet — the separated-egg, soufflé-style omelet started on the range and finished in the oven. You need that base recipe in hand; what follows is about filling and serving it.
- Have the filling ready firstA puffy omelet begins to collapse the moment it leaves the oven. Every sauce, cream mixture or vegetable here should be hot and held before the eggs go into the pan, so the fold and the plate happen in one continuous motion.
- What "puffy omelet" meansYolks and whites are beaten separately and folded, cooked in a skillet until set at the bottom, then finished in the oven until the center is just firm. Follow the base recipe for temperature and timing. It is closer to a flat soufflé than to a French rolled omelet.
- "Creamed" is a white sauceCreamed oysters, chicken, veal or spinach means the cooked ingredient bound in a medium white sauce: roughly 2 tablespoons fat, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk. If the book's own sauce recipe calls for shortening, butter can be substituted.
- OystersTwo minutes in their own liquor is enough; they should just plump and ruffle at the edge. Longer cooking toughens them.
- The canned tomatoesDrain them well and cook down before thickening, or the fold will weep and soften the omelet. Season firmly: salt, pepper, a pinch of sugar if the tomatoes are sharp.
- Cheese sauceSame white sauce with about 1/2 cup grated sharp cheese stirred in off the heat. Boiling after the cheese goes in makes it grainy and oily.
- QuantitiesRoughly a cup of filling is about as much as a folded omelet of this kind will hold; more and the fold will not close.
- YieldServe it straight from the pan; a puffy omelet does not reheat. Check the base recipe for its stated yield.
Snowdrift was a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening made by the Southern Cotton Oil Company. The puffy or "souffléd" omelet was a fixture of American cooking-school teaching in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — versions are often attributed to Fannie Farmer and her contemporaries — because it demonstrated the whole point of beaten egg whites in a single inexpensive dish. Variations such as these, appended to a base recipe, are a signature of the cooking-school style: teach one technique, then list the ways a household could stretch it across breakfast, luncheon and supper using leftover chicken or veal, a can of tomatoes, or whatever vegetable was at hand.