Eggs: Omelet
Plain Omelet. 4 eggs, 4 tablespoonfuls hot water, 1 tablespoonful butter, Pepper and salt.
Separate the whites from the yolks, beat the yolks with an egg beater till thick, and whip the whites on a platter with a wire whisk until you have a stiff froth. Add the seasonings and hot water. Last of all blend in the beaten whites. Heat an omelet pan and grease with butter, pour in the egg mixture, tip till the eggs set evenly, then set it where it will cook slowly, turning the pan around that it may brown all over.
When puffed and delicately browned on the bottom, take it from the fire and set on the top grate of the oven for a few minutes to cook to the heart. Press it with your finger; if none of the egg mixture clings, it is cooked. Score lightly down the center, and turn out on a hot platter. Omelet Chassi (French recipe).
Make an omelet as described above.
Before folding, spread a cupful of creamed chicken over the top, then double and turn over on a platter.
Put on the top some thick, well-seasoned tomato sauce. Bread Omelet. 6 eggs, 3 tablespoonfuls stale bread crumbs, 1 cupful milk, Pepper and salt, 1½ tablespoonfuls butter.
Scald the milk, pour over the crumbs and allow it to soak, beat the whites and yolks separately until very light. Stir the crumb mixture into the yolks, add the seasoning, then cut in with a palette knife the whites beaten to a stiff froth. Pour into a deep buttered baking dish and bake in a hot oven till browned on top.
Oyster Omelet. 12 oysters, 3 tablespoonfuls cream, 3 tablespoonfuls strained oyster liquor, Pepper and salt, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 tablespoonful flour.
For this dish, prepare the oyster filling before beginning to cook the omelet. Strain the oysters and cut them with a scissors into small pieces.
Make a white sauce from the butter, flour, oyster liquor, cream, and seasonings. When hot and creamy, put in the chopped oysters and cook a few minutes. Set the sauce over EGGS boiling water to keep hot while making the omelet. When ready, pour over the oyster mixture, fold, and serve immediately.
Cheese Omelet.
Over an omelet, when ready to fold, sprinkle grated cheese with a little seasoning. Slip out on a hot platter and sprinkle again with cheese. Set in a hot oven for a few minutes before serving.
Ham Omelet.
Over the top of an omelet, before the egg begins to set, sprinkle 1/24 teacupful minced ham; let it cook for a minute or two longer, then set in the oven as directed, and serve hot.
Bismarck Omelet (German recipe). + pound bacon, 8 eggs.
Fry the bacon cut in dice; beat the eggs with pepper and salt; add to the bacon, and fry all together. Stir until it gets thick, and turn out on a dish.
Parsley Omelet (Scotch recipe). cupful cream, 6 eggs, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 tablespoonful minced parsley.
Beat the yolks of the eggs with a little cayenne and salt; add a small piece of shallot and parsley shredded fine; mix; whip the whites of the eggs and stir into the omelet, melt the butter in a frying pan, and pour in the eggs. Cook five minutes; serve very hot.
Eggs Fricasseed.
Put a piece of butter in a stewpan with some finely minced parsley and minced onion, 1 teacupful stock and 1 tablespoonful flour. Boil eggs hard, cut in slices, and put them in with a little salt and pepper. Beat up the yolk of an egg in½ cupful cream; add this with the juice of half a lemon. Mix well, make very hot, and serve with sippets of toasted or fried bread.
A run of separated-egg omelets in the late-Victorian manner, closer to a soufflé than to the folded French omelet most cooks make now. The base recipe governs all the variations that follow it.
- The hinge: don't overbeat, don't overcookWhites whipped to a stiff froth and then held over heat too long will weep and collapse. Beat to soft-to-firm peaks, fold with a spatula in as few strokes as possible, and stop cooking the moment the centre is just set.
- Oven temperatures"A hot oven" here is likely in the region of 400-425F; the bread omelet wants that heat to set and brown. The finishing step for the plain omelet — "the top grate of the oven" — carries no temperature in the original; a moderate oven for two or three minutes will do, or a broiler on low held well back.
- The omelet panA period omelet pan is heavy iron or steel with sloping sides, 8-10 inches across. A well-seasoned or nonstick skillet of the same size does the job; the 4-egg base fills it to the right depth.
- Bread omelet quantitiesThe butter figure for the bread omelet is printed as an implausible eleven tablespoonfuls. For six eggs and a cupful of milk, one to two tablespoons is the sensible range — enough to butter the dish and enrich the crumbs.
- Ham and bacon amountsThe ham omelet's quantity is garbled in the text; a quarter to a half teacupful of minced ham is a plausible reading for a 4-egg omelet. The Bismarck's bacon weight is also lost in printing — something around a quarter pound to eight eggs gives a good ratio — and that one is scrambled hard in the pan rather than folded, as the method makes clear.
- Oysters need two minutesOysters need only a couple of minutes -- The oyster filling is finished sauce, not a stew. Once the chopped oysters go into the hot white sauce they need only until the edges curl; longer and they turn rubbery. Shucked oysters today come in half-pints and pints, and a dozen with their liquor will fall somewhere between the two depending on size.
- Parsley omeletThe cream measure has lost its fraction; a quarter to a half cupful to six eggs is the likely range, and much more than that will make it hard to set. "A small piece of shallot" is probably no more than a teaspoon or so, minced very fine, or it will stay raw and crunchy in five minutes' cooking.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, toasted or fried in butter, set round the edge of the dish. Cut them from day-old bread so they hold their shape under the sauce.
- YieldThe 4-egg plain omelet serves two; the 6-egg bread omelet and the 8-egg Bismarck serve three to four each.
History: The separated-egg omelet — yolks beaten thick, whites whipped and folded in, the whole finished in the oven's mouth — appears to have been a common form of company omelet in American and English household cookery of this period, though folded and flat omelets appear in the same books. The flat, quickly rolled French omelet, cooked hot and fast with unseparated eggs, seems to have been known and treated as a different dish. The variations here carry the borrowed labels of the day: a chicken-and-tomato-sauce omelet given a French name, bacon under Bismarck's name as a German tag, parsley and shallot as "Scotch," and oysters, which were cheap and plentiful enough in this era to serve as a routine filling rather than a luxury. The closing fricassee of hard-boiled eggs in a lemon-and-cream sauce with sippets belongs to an older English tradition of dressing boiled eggs in a rich sauce, a way of making a substantial dish out of very little meat.