Home › Eggs › My Favorite Omelet
My Favorite Omelet
Six eggs, one tablespoon of butter, one tablespoon of flour, one cup of cold milk, one-half teaspoon of salt. Put the butter in a granite saucepan, and when it is melted (but not cooked hard), add the flour. Mix well. Now add the cold milk all at once, and stir until smooth.
Set aside to cool. Add the salt. Then separate the eggs, beating yolks until very light and whites until very stiff.
Fold first the yolks and then the whites into the sauce very carefully. Then put all into a granite baking dish and bake in moderate oven fifteen or twenty minutes. Serve immediately in the dish in which it was baked.- Mrs Grace E.
Dutton, Pasadena.
Orange Omelet, with Whipped Cream Three eggs, two tablespoons of powdered sugar, a few grains of salt, one teaspoon of lemon juice, two oranges, one-half tablespoon of butter, two and one-half tablespoons of orange juice; separate yolks from whites, beat yolks until thick and lemon colored, add seasonings, fold in whites beaten to a foam, cook in smooth frying pan or omelet pan in the hot butter, cook slowly, turning the pan that the omelet may brown evenly; when delicately browned underneath, place on the center or upper grate of the oven to cook or dry the top, fold, turn on hot platter, sprinkle with powdered sugar, garnish with slices of orange, serve with stiffly beaten whipped cream.
Two egg dishes in one entry: a baked soufflé omelet built on a white sauce, and a sweet folded omelet finished under oven heat. Both depend on beaten whites, so the timing is unforgiving at the end.
- The hinge: serve at onceBoth are soufflé-style and start collapsing the moment they leave the heat. Have the table set and the plates warm before the eggs go into the oven, and carry the baked one straight from oven to table in its dish, as instructed.
- "Granite" pansGraniteware is enamel-coated steel, the speckled grey-blue ware ubiquitous in American kitchens around 1900. Any heavy saucepan works for the sauce; for the baked omelet use a 1½-quart straight-sided baking dish or gratin dish.
- Moderate ovenRead as roughly 350\but still creamy centre in a dish of about 1 s o a wider, shallower dish will set faster.
- Cold milk into the rouxAdding all the cold milk at once to warm butter and flour is the reliable route to a lump-free sauce. The sauce must be cooled to at least lukewarm before the yolks go in, or they will scramble in it.
- Folding orderYolks first, then whites, and only until no white streaks remain. The whites should be stiff but not dry and grainy — overbeaten whites break down and the omelet bakes flat.
- The orange omelet's oven step"Place on the center or upper grate of the oven" means finishing the top under dry heat once the underside has browned; a hot oven around 400°F for a minute or two, or a broiler watched constantly, does the same job. The pan must be ovenproof — no plastic handles.
- Powdered sugarIn period usage this meant finely ground sugar, not necessarily identical to today's confectioners' sugar. Modern confectioners' sugar works here, and the cornstarch in it is harmless.
- YieldThe six-egg baked omelet serves three to four; the orange omelet, made with three eggs, serves two as a dessert or breakfast sweet.
This page carries a contributor's name and town -- Mrs. Grace E. Dutton of Pasadena -- the mark of a cookbook compiled from individual contributions rather than written to a single house style. Her dish is what French cookery calls an omelette souffl , in American usage of the period, a puffy omelet: eggs lightened with beaten whites and stabilised by a white-sauce base, baked rather than folded. The distinction between the "French" omelet cooked flat and fast in a pan and the "puffy" omelet raised with separated eggs was taught in turn-of-the-century cooking schools. The orange version belongs to a once-common category of sweet omelets served as dessert or as a light supper dish.