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OMELET (a la Celestine)
Mix two eggs very smoothly with two ounces of dried flour. Add a small pinch of salt, two table-spoonfuls of powdered sugar, and half a pint of good milk. Dissolve an ounce of butter in a hot frying-pan, pour in two table-spoonfuls of the batter, and let it spread all over the pan. When firm, put a tea-spoonful of good jam and a dessert-spoonful of rich custard in the middle of the omelet, fold it over, and roll it round and round. Arrange the omelets neatly on a hot dish, sift a little powdered sugar over them, and serve immediately. These omelets are sometimes made with beaten egg and sugar only. Time, three or four minutes to fry. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
Despite the name, this is a thin sweet pancake batter rather than an omelet in the modern sense — the eggs are heavily diluted with flour and milk, so treat it as a crêpe and it will behave.
- The measurementsTwo ounces of flour is about 1/2 cup, spooned and levelled. Half a pint in a British book of this period is 10 fl oz, so roughly 1 1/4 cups of whole milk.
- "Dried flour"Flour was once warmed or aired before the fire to drive off damp so it would measure and mix consistently. Bagged flour needs nothing; simply sift it.
- Powdered sugarHere it means granulated sugar ground fine — closer to today's caster sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch, which is fine for the dusting at the end but makes a slightly gummier batter.
- Rest the batterMixing eggs and flour smoothly first, then thinning with milk, avoids lumps. The recipe calls for no rest, but half an hour's standing is usual modern practice for a thin batter of this kind.
- The butterThe wording is ambiguous, but an ounce is best read as butter for the whole batch rather than for each omelet. Melt a little, pour off the excess, and re-grease lightly between omelets or they will fry rather than set.
- The hingeTwo tablespoonfuls of batter must spread thin and set fast — pan properly hot, and tilt immediately. A thick, slow-cooked round will not roll without cracking.
- Real timingThe book's 'three or four minutes to fry' is generous for a round this thin; a crepe of two spoonfuls takes about a minute on the first side and less on the second.
- The fillingUse a thick pastry cream rather than a pouring custard, or it will run out of the roll and scorch on the dish. Warm the jam slightly so it spreads instead of tearing the surface.
- YieldAt two tablespoonfuls apiece the batter gives well over a dozen small rolled omelets, ample for the original's three or four persons. Hold them on a warm dish, sugar them at the last moment and serve at once, as they toughen as they cool.
Cassell's places this among the sweet omelets, and Victorian usage drew no firm line between a thin omelet and what we would now call a crepe. A sweet omelette Celestine -- a thin omelet spread with jam, rolled and dusted with sugar -- belongs to the classical French repertoire, though the name Celestine also attaches to savoury preparations. The closing tally of cost in pence is characteristic of the household dictionaries of the period.