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Spinach Omelet
Beat a large table-spoonful of flour smoothly with four table-spoonfuls of cold milk; add two ounces of butter melted, a seasoning of pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg, and the yolks of four well-beaten eggs. Wash thoroughly and afterwards shred finely a quarter of a pound of spinach, a quarter of a pound of beet, half an ounce of parsley, a quarter of an ounce of lemon-thyme, and a quarter of an ounce of leeks. Mix the chopped vegetables together, and stir them into the batter. Butter a pie-dish thickly just before the omelet is to be baked; whisk the whites of the eggs to a firm froth, stir them into the preparation, turn it into the buttered dish, and bake in a quick oven. Time to bake, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A baked, souffle-style omelet rather than a pan omelet: a thin flour-and-milk batter enriched with yolks and butter, loaded with finely shredded greens and lifted by whipped whites. It behaves like a souffle, so the sequence at the end matters more than anything else.
- The hinge: fold and bake at onceThe whites go in last and the dish goes straight into an already-hot oven. Any delay while you butter the dish or preheat and the froth collapses, leaving a dense green pancake.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400-450F (200-230C) in modern terms; the book gives no temperatures. Twenty minutes at that heat sets the outside and leaves the centre just barely moist.
- "Beet" means the leavesA quarter pound of shredded beet root would not cook through in twenty minutes; the reading almost certainly intended is leaf beet -- what we call chard, or beet tops. Swiss chard leaves, stems removed, are the closest substitute.
- Lemon-thymeStill grown but rarely sold. A quarter ounce is roughly two tablespoons of picked leaves; use ordinary thyme with a strip of finely grated lemon zest if you cannot find it.
- LeeksA quarter ounce is about a tablespoon, finely shredded — a seasoning, not a vegetable. Use the white part only, as the green will not soften in the time given.
- Wring the greens dryThe instruction to wash thoroughly is not optional with spinach and chard, but water left clinging will steam inside the batter and slacken it. Shred, then squeeze hard in a cloth before mixing in.
- MeasuresTwo ounces of butter is four tablespoons; four tablespoons of milk is a quarter cup.
- Dish and yieldA buttered 8-9 inch pie dish or shallow baking dish suits this quantity. Sufficient for three or four as a light course; it must be served straight from the oven, as it sinks within minutes.
- Probable costTenpence in pre-decimal money — an indication of the book's frugal intent rather than anything useful at the till.
Cassell's places this among a family of baked "omelets" that owe more to the French omelette soufflée than to the folded pan omelet, and the technique — separating the eggs, building a thin panada of flour and milk, folding in whipped whites — is straightforwardly that of a savoury soufflé under a humbler name. The mixture of spinach, leaf beet, parsley, thyme and leek is close to the old English and French kitchen-garden convention of herbes or a green herb pudding, in which several mild leaves are combined so that no single one dominates; leaf beet was a common kitchen-garden green in the nineteenth century. The costing in pence, given for nearly every entry in the Dictionary, is a reminder of the book's audience: households running on a fixed weekly allowance, for whom a dish stretching four eggs and a handful of garden leaves into a course for four was a practical proposition rather than a culinary one.