For Omelet
4 eggs 1/2 teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne 1 tablespoon butter 4 tablespoons hot water Cook together the minced liver and Spanish Sauce or brown gravy, add the vinegar, mushrooms and seasonings. Keep warm while preparing the omelet. Make the omelet, following directions as given for light omelet. Just before folding spread with the liver mixture. Serve with Brown Sauce or Tomato Sauce.
This page has been printed with a mismatched ingredient list — the four eggs, salt, cayenne, butter and hot water belong to the plain omelet, while the filling ingredients named in the method (liver, Spanish sauce, vinegar, mushrooms) are never quantified. Treat it as a filling idea attached to a standard four-egg omelet.
- The missing quantitiesFor a four-egg omelet, about 1/4 lb of cooked chicken or calf liver, minced, with 1/3 cup of Spanish or brown sauce, a teaspoon of vinegar and a few tablespoons of sliced sautéed mushrooms will fill it without leaking. The original gives no amounts at all, so this is reconstruction rather than conversion.
- "Light omelet" methodThe companion recipe is not reproduced on this page; in books of this period a "light omelet" may mean either a French-style folded omelet or one made with the whites beaten separately. If it is the folded kind, the eggs are beaten with the salt, cayenne and hot water, poured into hot butter in a heavy pan, and lifted and stirred until just set. Hot water rather than milk is the usual choice in such recipes and is generally said to lighten the curd with steam.
- Spanish SauceIn books of this period Spanish sauce is usually a brown sauce built on stock, commonly with tomato and onion, rather than a chunky tomato-and-pepper salsa; the recipe's own alternative, "or brown gravy," points the same way. A demi-glace or a well-reduced brown gravy stands in directly.
- Cook the liver first"Cook together the minced liver and Spanish Sauce" is ambiguous: it may mean reheating already-cooked liver in the sauce, or simmering it raw. Long simmering in gravy tends to leave liver grainy and grey, so it is better to sear it in butter, then chop it and fold it into the warm sauce — making sure it is cooked through.
- Keep the filling thickA thin filling weeps through the fold and turns the omelet slack. Reduce the sauce until it coats the liver and mounds on a spoon before it goes anywhere near the eggs.
- Pan and heatA 9- or 10-inch nonstick or well-seasoned steel pan over medium-high heat, with the butter foaming but not browning. Four eggs in a smaller pan give a thick omelet that sets before you can fold it.
- YieldOne four-egg omelet serves two at breakfast or one as a main course. Doubling the eggs in one pan does not work; make two omelets.
Filled omelets of this kind were one way to use up small quantities of cooked meat — a bit of liver from the day before, a spoonful of brown sauce. Gold Medal's cook book, issued by the Washburn-Crosby milling company as promotional literature, follows a pattern common after Fannie Farmer and the Boston Cooking School: one master recipe for a "light omelet" or "plain omelet" and then a run of variations that simply say "follow directions as given for light omelet." Whether the mismatch on this page is a typesetting error or simply the book's habit of printing only the base omelet's ingredients cannot be settled from the page itself. Liver was cheap, iron-rich and commonly eaten at breakfast in the early twentieth century, in a way it largely stopped being by mid-century.