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Eggs, Frothed
Mix the juice of a lemon with a table-spoonful of water, and beat up with it the yolks of eight eggs and the whites of four. Sweeten to taste, and add a pinch of salt. Put the mixture into an omelet-pan and fry carefully. Have ready four whites of eggs whipped with a pound of fine sugar to a high froth, and flavoured with vanilla or lemon. Place the omelet on a dish, and heap the frothed eggs over it. Brown it lightly in an oven or before the fire. Time to fry, about five minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for four persons.
A sweet omelette buried under meringue — an omelette soufflée in all but name. Two things need attention before you start: the sugar quantity in the meringue, and the fact that the pan work has to be quick and gentle.
- The sugar is out of proportionA pound of sugar to four whites is roughly double what a modern meringue takes and will give a dense, weeping, cloyingly sweet cap. Standard practice is about 2 oz (55-60 g) of caster sugar per white, so 8 oz total, added a spoonful at a time once the whites hold soft peaks.
- "Fine sugar"Probably not confectioners' sugar in the modern sense; in Victorian usage the phrase generally means finely ground or sifted sugar, close to caster, which dissolves in the whites without grittiness. Ordinary granulated will work if you beat it in slowly.
- Browning heatThe original offers an oven or an open fire. In a modern kitchen, a few minutes in a hot oven (about 425F), or 1 to 2 minutes under a hot broiler with the dish watched constantly. The meringue should take colour on the peaks only; longer and it dries and cracks.
- Frying the baseButter a heavy 10-inch pan over medium-low heat and let the egg mixture set slowly without stirring. Five minutes is right for the stated quantity; the sweetened yolks catch and turn bitter faster than a savoury omelette, so keep the heat below the point where the butter browns.
- Why yolks and whites are split unevenlyEight yolks to four whites gives a rich, custardy base rather than a fluffy one; the remaining four whites are what the recipe calls for in the topping, so eight eggs are used up exactly.
- Use an ovenproof dishThe omelette is turned out before the meringue goes on, so the serving dish itself goes into the oven or under the fire. A metal or stoneware platter, not porcelain that has never seen direct heat.
- Sweeten to tasteFor the yolk mixture, 1 to 2 tablespoons of sugar is enough given how sweet the topping is. Judge it against the lemon juice, which is there to cut the richness.
- Cost and yield1s 6d reflects the eggs and the pound of sugar. It serves four as written, and it does not keep: meringue over a hot omelette begins to slump soon after it leaves the heat.
The dish belongs to the family the French call omelette soufflée: an egg base, a whipped meringue, and a quick colouring at high heat, a technique related to the later baked Alaska. The heavy hand with sugar is characteristic of the period rather than of any fault in the recipe -- refined sugar had fallen steeply in price through the nineteenth century, and Victorian dessert cookery used it in quantities that read as excessive now. The instruction to brown "in an oven or before the fire" is a reminder that many kitchens still worked at an open range, where a dish could be held up to the coals or finished under a heated salamander iron long before the domestic broiler existed.