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Orange Omelet
Peel three oranges down to the juice-pulp, then slice in - lengthwise strips until the heavier "rag" around the core is reached. Set these slices aside. Make a plain omelet with three eggs, beating whites and yolks separately. Add to the yolks one-half cup of orange juice and the grated rind of one orange, a saltspoon of salt and two tablespoonfuls of sugar. Beat this in with the stiffwhipped whites and place in hot buttered omelet pan. When the omelet is set and browning, place the sliced orange on top, fold over, and serve at once.
A sweet soufflé-style omelet in the Victorian manner, folded around orange segments. The technique is sound; the proportions need a little management.
- The hinge: the juiceHalf a cup of orange juice against three eggs is a great deal of liquid, and it will slacken the yolks so far that the beaten whites cannot hold the structure. Reducing the juice to two or three tablespoons, or simmering the half cup down to that volume first and cooling it, gives a mixture that sets rather than weeps.
- "Peel down to the juice-pulp"Cut away peel and all white pith with a knife until the glistening flesh is exposed; the recipe then has you slice the flesh in lengthwise strips down to the tougher membrane and core it calls the "rag". This is close to what is now called supreming, though supreming proper frees whole segments from the membrane. Do it over a bowl and the escaping juice can go into the eggs.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon.
- Grate the rind firstZest the orange before peeling it; once it is supremed there is nothing left to grate. One orange gives roughly a tablespoon of zest.
- Omelet pan and heatAn 8- to 9-inch nonstick or well-seasoned pan over medium heat. A soufflé omelet with sugar in it browns faster than a plain one, so keep the heat below the point where the butter smokes, and give it three to four minutes covered to set the top before folding.
- Drain the segmentsOrange sections carry more juice than they look to. Blot them on a towel before laying them on the omelet, or the liquid runs out and unseats the fold.
- YieldThree eggs serves two as a light dessert or breakfast. Serve immediately: a sweet omelet collapses within a minute or two of leaving the pan.
Sweet omelets were standard nineteenth-century cookery, sitting comfortably at breakfast, supper or the dessert course, and the puffed kind made by whipping the whites separately was known variously as a soufflé omelet or omelette mousseline. The orange version may belong to a particular moment: single-fruit cookbooks are often said to have proliferated in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a development commonly linked to refrigerated rail cars bringing Florida and California citrus to northern markets year-round and turning the orange from a Christmas-stocking rarity into an everyday ingredient a home cook could build a whole chapter around. Books of this kind are generally described as working through a fruit exhaustively, from soups and salads to omelets and puddings, partly as instruction and partly, it is sometimes suggested, as promotion by growers' associations, which would have had an obvious interest in persuading households that oranges were good for more than eating out of hand. Whether this recipe arose from that context, however, is not something the source establishes.