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Omelet, Onion
Cut a large Spanish onion into dice, and fry these in a little hot butter until they are tender without being browned. Drain them from the fat, and mix with them half a dozen eggs lightly beaten. Add a pinch of salt, two pinches of pepper, and a small portion of grated nutmeg, and fry the omelet according to the directions already given. White sauce may be served with this dish. Time, five or six minutes to fry the omelet. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for three persons.
OMELET-PAN. (See illustration accompanying the article, BACON OR HAM OMELET.)
A plain French-style omelet enriched with sweated onion, from a book that assumes you have already read its master omelet method. A few of its assumptions need spelling out.
- The hinge: sweat, don't brownThe onion must go soft and translucent without colour, which takes 10-15 minutes over low heat with a lid off and frequent stirring. Browned onion turns the omelet sweet and speckled, which is a different dish.
- Drain the onion wellButter left clinging to the dice will pool and split the egg as it sets. Tip the onion onto kitchen paper and let it cool slightly before it meets the beaten eggs, or the eggs begin to scramble in the bowl.
- "A large Spanish onion"Roughly 10-12 oz (300-350 g), mild and sweet. For six eggs that is a generous but correct proportion; a smaller yellow onion will read as sharper.
- Six eggs is two pans, not oneCassell's serves three from a single six-egg omelet, which needs a 10-11 inch pan to stay thin enough to cook in five minutes. In a standard 8-9 inch pan, make two three-egg omelets in succession.
- "Fry according to the directions already given"The master method is elsewhere in the book; the standard technique it points to is a hot pan, butter foaming but not coloured, pour in the eggs, draw the setting edges to the centre with a fork while tilting the pan, then fold and turn out while the middle is still slightly loose. The stated five or six minutes suits a large omelet of this size; a three-egg one will be done in about two.
- Two pinches of pepperThe recipe does not say which; white pepper is the likely intention for a pale dish, and it keeps the omelet unspeckled. Nutmeg here means a scrape or two, not a measured pinch — it should not be identifiable.
- The white sauceA thin béchamel, poured round rather than over so the surface of the omelet stays dry. Optional by any modern standard, and the dish is lighter without it.
- Probable cost, 9d.Ninepence, from the pre-decimal shillings-and-pence system. Prices like this were a selling point of Victorian household dictionaries and are useless as a guide now beyond showing this was cheap family food.
Cassell's arranged its cookery dictionary alphabetically, so omelets appear as a long run of variations — bacon or ham, cheese, kidney, onion — each cross-referring back to a single master method rather than repeating it. The onion version sits in the plainest tier: no meat, ninepence for the whole dish, and enough for three. The Spanish onion specified was a large mild variety imported in quantity to Britain through the nineteenth century, valued precisely because it could be eaten in bulk without the harshness of a small English keeping onion. The suggestion of white sauce alongside reads as a genteel touch rather than a rustic one; the French tradition would leave a folded omelet unsauced, though Victorian English cookery often paired béchamel with egg dishes.