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Omelet with Tomato Sauce
Four eggs, four tablespoons cold water, two tablespoons butter and one of flour, salt and paprika to taste. Beat eggs thoroughly-yolks until thick and lemon colored, whites until stiff and dry.
To the beaten yolks add flour and seasoning, then the water; lastly fold in the whites, taking care not to beat, as that will make the omelet tough. Have the butter hot, but not browned, in an omelet pan, pour in the mixture, with a spatula lift gently from the center until it is set, then place the pan in a moderate oven a few minutes to slightly brown the top. While this is being done, make sauce by blending together the butter and flour, adding the cup of strained tomato, onion juice and seasoning. Cook until the mixture thickens. If eggs are perfectly fresh and well beaten, the omelet may be too thick to fold. If so, slip off on to hot chop plate, and pour the sauce around it. If not, fold over gently, garnish with the sauce and serve at once on hot plates. If the tomato sauce is not liked, sprinkle and garnish with chopped parsley, with minced ham, or jelly, as preferred. When carefully made this is one of the daintiest of breakfast dishes. - Mary Moody Pugh, Omaha.
This is a puffy or soufflé omelet, not a French rolled one, and the ingredient list at the top only covers the eggs. The sauce quantities are buried in the method and have to be reconstructed.
- The missing sauce listThe header lists no tomato at all, and it is unclear whether the two tablespoons butter and one of flour are meant to cover both the pan and the sauce. Reckon on about a tablespoon each of butter and flour for the cup of strained tomato called for, plus a teaspoon or so of onion juice, salt and paprika.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut for onion flavour without pieces: grate an onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze a grated half-onion in a cloth. A teaspoon is plenty for a cup of tomato.
- Strained tomatoAt the time this meant fresh tomatoes stewed and pushed through a sieve; canned tomato was widely available. Passata is the direct modern equivalent; canned crushed tomato blitzed and sieved also works.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. The omelet is already set on the stovetop, so the oven is only puffing and colouring the top — three to five minutes, and watch it, since a souffle omelet collapses and dries quickly.
- Fold, do not beatThis is the hinge. The whites carry the whole structure, so combine them with the yolk mixture in a few broad strokes and stop while streaks are still visible. Overworking gives the tough, flat omelet the recipe warns against.
- Whites "stiff and dry"Modern practice stops short of dry. Beat to firm peaks that still look glossy; whites taken to the point of looking chalky have begun to break down and will weep in the pan.
- The omelet panAn 8-inch ovenproof skillet, well seasoned or nonstick. Anything wider spreads four eggs too thin to puff, and the handle needs to survive the oven.
- YieldFour eggs feeds two generously, one if it is the centre of a breakfast. Both omelet and sauce want to be finished together — the sauce holds, the omelet does not.
The puffy omelet, made by beating yolks and whites separately, was a fixture of American cookbooks from the 1870s onward and was often distinguished in print from the "French" omelet of whole eggs stirred in the pan. It reads as a genteel breakfast dish, and the tomato sauce, onion juice and paprika all point to a turn-of-the-century kitchen with canned tomato on the shelf and a taste for mild colour and seasoning rather than heat. The attribution to Mary Moody Pugh of Omaha gives the entry a name and a city and a personal voice — note the closing line about daintiness and the list of alternative garnishes, which is a cook talking rather than an editor writing to a house style.