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Raspberry Omelet
Break three eggs into a basin, and add a tea-spoonful of sugar and two table-spoonfuls of milk or cream. Melt two ounces of butter in an omelet-pan. Beat the eggs, etc. till they are quite frothy, and keep on beating them till the last moment. When the butter is frothing pour in the mixture, and stir quickly with a spoon, scraping the bottom of the frying-pan all the time till the omelet begins to set. Draw it a little from the fire, and work it into a half-moon shape. Hold it before the fire in a slanting position to make it rise, put a spoonful of raspberry jam in the centre, and serve the omelet immediately. If preferred, the jam may be placed on one half of the omelet, and the other half turned completely over it. Time, three or four minutes. Probable cost, 8d. Sufficient for two persons.
A sweet omelet of the classic French type, cooked fast in a great deal of butter. The whole thing takes about four minutes, so have the jam warmed and the plates out before the eggs go in.
- Butter quantityTwo ounces (about 4 tablespoons) for a three-egg omelet is generous by modern standards and will pool. An ounce is plenty in a well-seasoned or non-stick 8-inch pan; the rest can be swirled in at the end for gloss.
- "When the butter is frothing"This is the hinge. Pour the eggs in while the foam is still white and subsiding, before it colours. Butter that has browned will speckle a sweet omelet and taste nutty rather than clean.
- Beating to the last momentThe instruction is deliberate. Air whipped in just before cooking is what makes this omelet puff rather than lie flat, and it collapses within a minute if the bowl sits waiting.
- "Hold it before the fire"An open range gave direct radiant heat that could be used to finish a dish. The modern equivalent is thirty to sixty seconds under a hot grill or broiler with the pan handle out, or simply leaving the pan covered off the heat for a minute.
- DonenessStop while the centre is still visibly moist and glossy. Carryover heat sets it on the plate, and an omelet cooked until dry will crack when folded over the jam.
- The jamWarm it slightly first. Cold jam straight from the jar chills the centre and will not spread; a spoonful loosened over low heat or in the microwave folds in cleanly.
- SugarA single teaspoon in the eggs is barely sweet, which is intentional; the jam carries the sugar. A dusting of caster sugar over the finished omelet is a reasonable addition if you want it sweeter.
- Cost and yieldThe 8d. is a period price of no current use. Two servings is accurate if the omelet is a light supper or savoury-course sweet; one hungry person will finish it.
Sweet omelets are often said to have been a standard closing dish in nineteenth-century English service, appearing as a light entremets after the roast rather than as breakfast food, and the technique -- constant stirring, a half-moon fold, a final blast of top heat -- is the same for savoury versions. The jam filling reflects how ubiquitous preserved fruit had become in British households by the 1870s and 80s, when cheap sugar and the spread of home and commercial jam-making meant raspberry preserve was a pantry staple year-round. The direction to hold the pan slanting before the fire points to the kitchen of the period: it assumes an open coal range with exposed radiant heat, a fitting that closed ranges and gas cookers had largely displaced within a generation of the book's publication.