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Potato Omelet
Take a large freshly-baked potato, break it open, and scoop out with a spoon the inside. Beat this till smooth, and mix with it a little pepper and salt, a dessert-spoonful of lemon-juice, and the yolks of four eggs. A minute or two before the omelet is to be fried, add the whites of the eggs beaten to a firm froth. Fry in the usual way, and serve on a hot dish. Garnish with parsley. Time to fry, five or six minutes. Probable cost, 5d. or 6d. Sufficient for two persons.
POTATO OMELET (another way). (See OMELET, POTATO.)
A soufflé-style omelet rather than a folded French one: the potato does the work of a starch binder and the beaten whites do the lifting. Everything hinges on getting the whites in at the last moment and not overworking them.
- The hinge: fold, don't stir"Add the whites of the eggs beaten to a firm froth" a minute or two before frying means fold them into the potato-and-yolk base in two or three additions with a spatula. Beat them in and the omelet will be flat and leathery instead of puffed.
- The potato must be hotThe potato must be freshly baked -- "freshly-baked" is not incidental. A warm floury potato mashes smooth; a cold or waxy one goes gluey and will streak the eggs with lumps. A large floury baking potato of about 8-10 oz gives roughly a cup of flesh.
- Beat the yolks in off the heatAdd the four yolks to the mashed potato while it is warm but not scalding, or they will set into scrambled threads before the omelet reaches the pan.
- Fat and panThe recipe does not say what to fry in; butter or dripping would have been the usual choices. About 1 oz butter in an 8-9 inch pan suits it; the mixture is thick and needs a generous fat film to keep from catching.
- "Fry in the usual way"The recipe gives no detail beyond frying and serving on a hot dish. Moderate heat and minimal disturbance once the mixture sets suit a whites-lightened omelet; the stated time to fry is five or six minutes.
- A dessert-spoonfulTwo teaspoons, or about 10 ml, of lemon juice. It is there to cut the starch, not to flavour strongly.
- Yield and cost"Sufficient for two persons" as a supper or breakfast dish. The "5d. or 6d." is late-Victorian pence and is only useful now as a marker of how cheap an egg-and-potato dish was.
- The cross-reference"(See OMELET, POTATO.)" points to a second version filed elsewhere in the dictionary; the text here does not say what that version contains.
Cassell's arranges its material as a dictionary, which is why a dish appears twice under two headings with a cross-reference between them; the entry also carries a costing and a stated number of servings. The potato omelet belongs to the large Victorian family of thrift dishes that stretch eggs with something starchy, and this particular treatment — mashed potato, separated eggs, whites folded in at the last minute — is essentially a small soufflé cooked in a frying pan, a technique generally traced to the French omelette soufflée that English cookery writers of the period admired and simplified. The instruction to scoop the flesh from a freshly baked potato rather than boil one is a practical point about moisture: baked flesh is drier, and a drier base holds the beaten whites better.