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Rum Omelet
Beat three eggs in a bowl, and add a very small pinch of salt, a tea-spoonful of finely-powdered sugar, a slice of butter, and a table-spoonful of rum. Fry the omelet in the usual way. Lay it on a hot dish, and pour round it half a tumblerful of rum which has been warmed in a saucepan. Set light to this, and take the omelet to table with the flames rising round it. Sufficient for one or two persons.
A three-egg sweet omelet finished at the table in burning rum. The only technical difficulty is the flame, and the only real change worth making is to the quantity of spirit.
- "A slice of butter"Victorian shorthand for a piece cut off the block, roughly 1/2 to 1 oz (1-2 tablespoons). Here it goes into the eggs rather than the pan, so use about 1 tablespoon softened and add more to the pan for frying.
- Finely-powdered sugarCaster sugar, or confectioners' sugar if that is what you have. Granulated will not dissolve in the short time the eggs are in the pan and gives a gritty result.
- Half a tumblerful is a great dealA Victorian tumbler held 8-10 fl oz, so this asks for 4-5 fl oz of rum for one or two people. Two tablespoons is enough to give a good sheet of flame; more simply burns longer and leaves the omelet soaked and bitter.
- Warming the rumWarm spirit lights far more readily than cold. Cooks commonly aim for about 130F, though that is a rule of thumb rather than a fixed ignition point. Heat it just until you can smell it strongly, off the heat and away from the flame, and never pour from the bottle towards a lit pan.
- The dish mattersUse a warmed metal or flameproof dish, not glazed china or glass, and clear the area above it. Have a lid or a large plate within reach to smother the flame if it runs longer than you want.
- Fry it soft"in the usual way" means a hot pan, the eggs pulled in from the edges, and the omelet folded while the centre is still loose. The book gives no pan size.
- YieldAs written, one generous portion or two small ones, served immediately; a sweet omelet collapses within a minute or two of leaving the pan.
Flaming a dish with spirit at the table belongs to the nineteenth-century dining room, where the last stage of a dish was often performed in front of the guests by a servant or by the host. Sweet omelets of this kind sat in the same family as omelette soufflé and omelette aux confitures, all of them dessert dishes built on the same three or four eggs as a savoury one. Rum was cheap and abundant in Britain through the West India trade.