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Tomato Omelet
Take four ripe tomatoes, peel them, and chop them small. Beat a large table-spoonful of flour to a smooth paste with a little milk. Add six well-beaten eggs, a little pepper and salt, and the tomatoes. Fry the omelet in the usual way, and fold it over if liked, but do not turn it. Time to fry, five or six minutes. Probable cost, about 10d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A flat, flour-bound omelet closer to a Spanish tortilla or a frittata than to the French rolled kind. The main risk is watery tomato loosening the eggs.
- Drain the tomatoesFour ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped, release a great deal of liquid into six eggs. Seed them and let the flesh drain in a sieve for ten minutes, or cook the chopped tomato in a little butter until the pan is dry before adding it to the eggs.
- PeelingA cross cut in the base and thirty seconds in boiling water, then cold water, slips the skins off cleanly. Scalding to loosen the skins was the usual period method too.
- The flour pasteA tablespoon of flour slaked with a little milk is a thickener to hold the tomato juice, not a batter. Whisk it perfectly smooth before the eggs go in, or the omelet will carry lumps.
- Cost and quantity"Probable cost, about 10d" is a Victorian household budgeting note of roughly tenpence, of no use now beyond showing this was cheap family food. Six eggs across three or four people is a light supper dish rather than a main.
- Pan and heatUse a 9 to 10 inch nonstick or well-seasoned pan over medium heat with a good knob of butter. The recipe gives five or six minutes but names no heat; too high and the base browns before the flour-thickened centre sets.
- Do not turn itThe instruction matters. This omelet is set from below and the top is left just moist; flipping it makes a dense pancake. If the surface is still too loose to fold, slide the pan under a hot grill for a minute instead.
- ServingSlide it out flat or fold once and serve at once on a warmed dish. It collapses and weeps if held.
Cassell's belongs to the period when the tomato had finally shed its long-standing English reputation as suspect and become an everyday market vegetable; British cookery books of the 1870s onward carry an increasing number of tomato soups, sauces and stews where earlier volumes had almost none. The flour-and-milk paste is characteristic of the era's household omelets, which were expected to feed several people from a modest number of eggs and were stretched and stabilised accordingly. Folding without turning is a common instruction in English books of the period, and the resulting dish sits closer to what a modern cook would call a frittata. The pricing note, given in pence, was a routine feature of Cassell's entries.