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Omelet, Potatoes
Mash two ounces of mealy potatoes, and mix with them four fresh eggs, lightly beaten, a table-spoonful of powdered sugar, half a small nutmeg, grated, the strained juice of a large lemon, half a pint of new milk, and two ounces of fresh butter. Beat the mixture thoroughly for ten minutes, then fry it over a gentle fire in the usual way. Sift powdered sugar over before serving. Time, about eight minutes to fry. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for three persons.
A Victorian sweet omelet, closer to a thick lemon pancake than to the folded savoury omelet. The proportions are unusual and worth reading twice before you commit eggs to the pan.
- The liquid is the hingeHalf an imperial pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups, against only four eggs and two ounces of potato. That is a batter, not an omelet mixture, and it will never set in the pan like a folded omelet. Treat it as a thick pancake cooked in a heavy pan and either turned or finished under a grill.
- Lemon juice into milkThe strained juice of a large lemon added to new milk will curdle it within seconds. The recipe says nothing about this; if you want a smooth mixture, add the juice last and cook immediately rather than letting it stand.
- Mealy potatoes"Mealy" means floury and dry-fleshed: a russet or a King Edward, not a waxy new potato. Two ounces is about 55 g, one small potato, and it should be mashed absolutely smooth and cooled before it meets the eggs, or you will get lumps that never break down.
- Powdered sugarIn this period powdered sugar means sugar crushed fine, the equivalent of caster or superfine sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch; it works for the dusting at the end but caster is closer to the original for the mixture.
- Half a small nutmegRoughly a teaspoon freshly grated, which is assertive by current taste. Use a quarter of that if you want the lemon to lead.
- "A gentle fire" and the timingLow to medium-low heat, and the stated eight minutes is realistic only for a thin layer in a wide pan. A thick pour of this wet mixture will brown underneath long before the centre sets; use a pan of at least 25 cm.
- Beating for ten minutesThe recipe uses no raising agent, so the beating is the only aeration. A few minutes with an electric whisk achieves the same thing, though the lightness will largely collapse once the milk goes in.
- Yield and costThree portions, as stated. The 10d is the household costing Cassell's gave throughout, useful mainly as a guide to how cheap eggs, milk and potatoes were relative to meat.
Sweet omelets were a fixture of British middle-class cookery through the nineteenth century, serving as an inexpensive second-course or supper dish at a time when eggs, milk and butter were the cheapest route to something that felt like a pudding. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, thought to have been compiled in the later part of the century, arranged thousands of such entries alphabetically, and each recipe carries a probable cost and a number of persons served. The potato here is doing the work that flour or breadcrumbs do in related recipes: absorbing liquid and giving body to an egg mixture stretched with a good deal of milk. Potatoes had by then long shed their earlier reputation as fodder and appeared freely in sweet dishes, from potato pudding to potato cheesecakes, a tradition generally traced back to eighteenth-century English cookery books.