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Friar's Omelet
Make a light batter of three eggs, two table-spoonfuls of butter (melted), two of sugar, and half a dozen stewed apples, reduced to a pulp. When well beaten together, fry as an omelet in butter. Time, ten minutes. Probable cost, 8d.
An apple omelet in the sweet-omelet tradition: eggs, butter, sugar and apple pulp beaten together and cooked in a pan. The whole thing hinges on the apple being dry enough to hold the eggs together.
- Reduce the apples properly"Stewed apples reduced to a pulp" means a thick, almost jam-like purée, not loose stewed fruit. Six apples cooked down with almost no water gives roughly two cups of pulp; if it is watery the omelet will weep and refuse to set.
- Butter measureTwo tablespoons of melted butter is about 1 oz / 28 g, and it is part of the batter — you need further butter in the pan on top of that.
- Sweetness and apple varietyTwo tablespoons of sugar assumes sharp cooking apples of the Bramley type. With modern sweet dessert apples, cut the sugar back and add lemon juice, or the result is cloying.
- Ten minutes is for a thick pan-set cake, not an omeletTen minutes suits a thick pan-set cake more than a rolled omelet -- This quantity of batter is heavy for rolling like a savoury omelet. Cook it slowly in a well-buttered 8-9 in pan over low-to-moderate heat until the base is set and coloured, then either flip it or finish it under a grill. Ten minutes total is realistic only if the heat is gentle and the pan is covered.
- Separating the eggs"A light batter" and "well beaten" suggest air is wanted. Whisking the whites separately and folding them in gives a noticeably lighter result and is consistent with the period's sweet omelets.
- YieldThree eggs and two cups of apple serve two generously, three at a stretch, as a dessert or supper dish.
- The cost note8d is eightpence in pre-decimal currency — twelve pence to the shilling. It is a marker of a cheap dish, useful mainly for comparing recipes within the book.
- ServingThe original stops at the pan. Period practice was to dust it heavily with sifted sugar and serve at once, sometimes glazed with a hot salamander or under a grill until the sugar caught.
Friar's omelet is normally the name of a baked pudding — apple purée layered with buttered breadcrumbs and eggs, browned in the oven, and known in English cookery books from the early nineteenth century onward. The version here has dropped the breadcrumbs and the oven and gone back to the pan, which puts it in the large Victorian family of sweet omelets: eggs beaten with sugar and a fruit purée, jam, or liqueur, cooked quickly and sugared at the table. The monastic name is generally explained as a nod to a cheap meatless dish suitable for fast days, though that reading is traditional rather than documented. Its appearance in Cassell's reflects how useful such a recipe was to a household with windfall apples, a few eggs and no baking oven lit.