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Breakfast Omelet
Three pounds raw steak chopped fine, six butter crackers rolled very fine, four eggs, two tablespoons melted butter, season them with salt and pepper, put in shape, butter a tin and bake, basting often.
Despite the name, this is a baked beef loaf bound with egg and cracker crumbs — a nineteenth-century breakfast meat meant to be sliced hot or cold. The original gives no oven heat, no time and no pan size, so those are the gaps to fill.
- The hinge: keep it moistThree pounds of chopped steak with only four eggs and six crackers is a very dry mixture by modern standards. The instruction to baste often is not decorative — brush it with melted butter or pan drippings several times as it bakes, or it will bake into something closer to a meat brick.
- "Raw steak chopped fine"In many kitchens of the period this meant hand-chopping the meat rather than grinding it; the recipe does not say which cut. Ground beef of about 15 to 20 percent fat gives the closest result. Very lean modern ground round will exaggerate the dryness noted above.
- Butter crackersA round, mildly rich cracker of the period, larger than a modern saltine. Six of them rolled fine give perhaps a third to a half cup of crumbs — a modest binder for three pounds of meat, so pack the loaf firmly so it holds together.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. 350F suits a meat loaf of this size; hotter and the exterior sets and cracks before the middle cooks.
- Time and donenessA three-pound free-formed loaf needs roughly an hour to an hour and a quarter. Cook to an internal temperature of 160F at the centre, since the meat is ground rather than whole muscle.
- "Put in shape" and "butter a tin"The mixture was formed before baking, either by hand or pressed into a mould; the recipe specifies only a buttered tin. An open pan is what makes basting possible and gives a browned crust on all sides.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper alone is sparse for three pounds. Figure about a tablespoon of salt and a teaspoon of pepper.
- Yield and servingThree pounds of meat serves ten to twelve. A loaf this size lends itself to being sliced cold the next morning as well as served hot from the oven.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks used "omelet" more loosely than we do, and the name is sometimes attached to baked egg-bound mixtures like this one, which a later cook would simply call a beef loaf. It sits alongside the veal loaf and ham loaf found in books of the period: a large quantity of meat cooked once, then sliced cold over several days. The breakfast section of a book like this assumes a substantial hot meat course in the morning, an expectation that persisted in American households well into the twentieth century and faded as commercial cereals and lighter morning meals took hold.