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Friar's Omelet
4 tablespoonfuls sugar 1 tablespoonful butter 5 eggs bread crust ½ teaspoonful powdered 2 tablespoonfuls brown cinnamon Peel, core, and slice the apples into a saucepan, add the sugar, butter, and cinnamon. Cook till tender and rub through a sieve. Add the bread crumbs, yolks of the eggs, and the whites of the eggs stiffly beaten.
Turn into a buttered fireproof dish, dredge the top with sugar, bake in a moderate oven for twenty minutes.
Serve hot.
A baked apple souffle-pudding rather than an omelet, printed here with its ingredient column badly scrambled by the original typesetting. The quantities below are what the method actually requires.
- The broken ingredient listApples are the main ingredient but appear nowhere in the column, and the "2 tablespoonfuls brown" plainly belongs with the bread crumbs while the "1½ teaspoonful powdered" belongs with the cinnamon. Read it as: apples (quantity not given; enough to make a thick puree), 4 tablespoons sugar, 1 tablespoon butter, 1½ teaspoons powdered cinnamon, 5 eggs, 2 tablespoons brown bread crumbs from crust.
- Bread crust, not soft crumbsThe recipe specifies crust, so the crumbs are presumably from dried crust, grated or rolled fine, which stays coarse and absorbs the apple's moisture. Soft fresh crumbs are likely to go pasty.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 350-375F. Twenty minutes suits a shallow dish holding an inch or so of mixture; a deeper dish will need longer, and should come out just set at the center.
- Cool the apple firstSieved apple straight off the stove will scramble the yolks and slacken the beaten whites. Let it come down to warm before folding anything in.
- Fold, do not stirThe whites are the only leavening. Fold them into the apple base in two additions with a spatula and get the dish into the oven at once.
- Fireproof dishEarthenware or glass that could go directly into the oven. Any modern ceramic or glass baking dish, buttered, works.
- Five eggs to a pound and a half of fruitFive eggs is a rich proportion for a dish of stewed apple, and it will give roughly four to six servings. It falls quickly, so serve it hot from the oven as directed.
Friar's omelet, also written Friar's omelette, is an English baked apple pudding that appears in nineteenth-century cookery books, usually a layering or mixing of stewed apple with buttered breadcrumbs and eggs; the "omelet" of the name refers only to the eggs, and the friar is often explained as a nod to plain monastic cookery, though this is tradition rather than documented origin. Sieved fruit, egg and crumb were standard building blocks of period sickroom cookery, thought nourishing but undemanding.