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Banana Omelet
Beat three eggs separately, adding whites last, with a half-cup of sugar and breadcrumbs, a pinch of salt, and the pulp of three bananas. Into this stir the stiff whites and cook in omelet pan.
A soufflé-style sweet omelet from the era when bananas were still a novelty fruit worth building a dish around. The method is sound but the quantities are loose, and one of them is genuinely unclear.
- The ambiguous measure"A half-cup of sugar and breadcrumbs" can be read as half a cup of each or half a cup of the two combined. Half a cup of sugar to three eggs is very sweet; two tablespoons of sugar and about a quarter cup of dry fine crumbs gives a batter that holds together without tasting like candy.
- Beat the eggs separatelyThis is the hinge. Yolks with the sugar, crumbs, salt and banana pulp; whites whipped to the stiff peak the recipe calls for, but stopped while still glossy, and folded in at the end. Whites beaten past that to a dry, granular stiffness will break when folded into the heavy banana base.
- Banana pulpThree bananas mashed smooth is roughly a cup to a cup and a half. Use fruit that is ripe but not black, and mash rather than purée so the mixture is not soupy.
- "Cook in omelet pan"An 8- to 10-inch pan, buttered, over moderate heat. Cover and cook 4 to 5 minutes until the base is set and the top still slightly loose, then finish 3 to 4 minutes in a 350F oven rather than trying to flip it; the batter is too heavy to turn cleanly.
- Fold and serve at onceSlide it out, fold in half, and serve immediately. Like any whipped-white omelet it deflates within a couple of minutes of leaving the heat.
- YieldThree eggs gives one generous dessert omelet for two, or a light course for three. Dust with sugar; a squeeze of lemon over the banana keeps it from tasting flat.
Bananas reached American markets in commercial quantity only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the period responded by dropping the fruit into the existing frameworks they had: fritters, custards, ices, salads, and omelets. The sweet omelet itself was much older and French in descent — an omelette soufflée, eggs separated and the whites folded back in to lift the whole thing — and it appears as a dessert in nineteenth-century household manuals long before there was banana pulp to put in it.