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Ground Rice Omelet
Boil half an inch of stick cinnamon with half a pint of milk, and stir into it, when boiling, two table-spoonfuls of ground rice, which have been smoothly mixed with two table-spoonfuls of cold milk. Simmer gently for a quarter of an hour, and stir the mixture briskly. Pour it out, remove the cinnamon, and when cold add four eggs, well beaten, and sugar to taste. Beat the mixture for five or six minutes. Divide it into three parts; then fry these in butter, until brightly browned. A piece of butter, the size of a walnut, will be required for each. Time, five or six minutes to fry. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for four persons.
This is a sweet omelet in the Victorian sense: a thick rice-milk base enriched with eggs and fried in butter, closer to a set pancake than to a folded French omelet. The one thing that decides success is temperature -- the rice mixture must be genuinely cold before the eggs go in.
- Half a pintCassell's is a British book, so the pint is the imperial 20 fl oz: half a pint is 10 fl oz, or about 1 1/4 US cups. The extra two tablespoons of cold milk for slaking the rice is separate from that.
- Ground riceGround rice is a rice flour. Use it measure for measure, but slake it thoroughly in the cold milk first or it will lump the moment it meets the boiling milk.
- Cold, not warmFour beaten eggs stirred into a warm rice base will set into curds. Spread the cooked rice on a plate and let it come fully to room temperature, or chill it, before adding the eggs.
- The fifteen-minute simmerA quarter of an hour over low heat is right for rice flour, which needs time to lose its raw taste and swell. Keep the heat very gentle and stir constantly -- rice starch scorches on the bottom of the pan readily.
- Sugar to tasteNo quantity is given. One to two tablespoons for the whole batch suits it as a dessert; the cinnamon carries most of the flavour, so err low and dust the finished omelets with sugar at table.
- Beating the mixtureThe five or six minutes of beating is the only leavening this has. An electric whisk does it in two or three; you want the batter visibly lightened and pourable, not stiff.
- FryingButter the size of a walnut is usually reckoned at somewhere between half an ounce and an ounce, so about one to two tablespoons per omelet. A small pan over medium heat suits it -- high heat browns the butter and the surface before the centre sets. The recipe allows five or six minutes to fry.
- YieldThree omelets, called sufficient for four, which by modern portioning is three servings as a dessert. Serve at once with jam, stewed fruit or lemon.
Ground rice was one of the workhorses of the Victorian store cupboard, cheap and shelf-stable, used to thicken milk puddings, blancmanges and nursery dishes where cream or eggs alone would have cost too much. The sequence is a familiar one -- make a thick starch-bound base, cool it, aerate it with eggs, then set it in butter -- the same sequence that underlies soufflé omelets and fritter batters. The word omelet in nineteenth-century English cookery covered a much wider field than it does now, taking in sweet fried egg mixtures of this kind alongside the savoury ones; sweet omelets appear routinely in period menus as a second-course entremets. The stated cost of 8d for four is a reminder of the book's audience: households cooking to a budget, for whom a pudding built on two tablespoons of rice flour and four eggs was a real economy.