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Baked Cheese Omelet
Soak 1 scant cupful of fine stale bread crumbs in 1 pint of milk to which has been added 1 saltspoonful of baking-soda dissolved in 1 teaspoonful of hot water. When thoroughly soaked add 2 eggs beaten until very light, 1/4 of a teaspoonful of salt, one dash of cayenne, 1 scant cupful of grated cheese and 1 tablespoonful of melted butter. Turn quickly into a greased baking dish and place in a very hot oven. Serve as soon as it is well puffed up and pale brown, as it quickly falls.
A bread-and-cheese pudding baked hot and fast so it rises like a soufflé. The whole point is the serving: it collapses within a few minutes of leaving the oven, so have the table ready before it goes in.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Dissolved in a teaspoon of hot water, that much soda is there to lighten the mixture and to counter any acidity in the milk, not to leaven it outright — the eggs do that.
- Scant cupful"Scant" means just under a level cup. For fine crumbs from stale bread that is roughly 2–3 oz depending on how dry the loaf is; for the cheese, about 3 oz grated.
- Very hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; period tables generally put a "very hot" oven at about 450–500F. The high heat sets the outside quickly so the steam and egg can push the middle up. A moderate oven gives a dense, wet pudding instead.
- Baking dish sizeUse something deep rather than wide — a 1.5-quart soufflé dish or similar, since the raw mixture already comes to nearly a quart and needs headroom. Spread thin in a shallow gratin dish it will set flat with little rise.
- The cheeseA dry, sharp aged cheese is what the period meant: a firm Cheddar or a dry American. Pre-shredded cheese carries anti-caking starch that can make the mixture grainy; grate it yourself.
- Bread crumbsFine crumbs from genuinely stale bread, not the sandy dried crumbs sold for coating. Fresh soft bread works if you dry the crumbs briefly in a low oven first, otherwise they turn to paste in the milk.
- TimingThe original gives none. Expect 25–30 minutes at 425F; it is done when well risen and pale brown and the centre no longer wobbles as a liquid. Carry it straight to the table.
- YieldServes three as a light main course with a salad, or four as a side. Doubling it is a poor idea — a deeper mixture browns before the centre sets.
Baked cheese "omelets" of this kind sit somewhere between a French soufflé and the older English cheese pudding, and dishes of the type are common in economy cookery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The logic is plain in the arithmetic: three ounces of cheese, two eggs and some stale bread will feed a family where a joint of meat will not, and cheese was often promoted in this period as a cheap source of protein in place of meat. Stretching eggs with soaked bread crumbs is the same household thrift that produced bread puddings and panades, and the pinch of soda was most likely insurance against milk that had begun to turn, in the days before reliable refrigeration. The instruction to serve it the moment it puffs is the honest part of the recipe — with only two eggs and no separately beaten whites, this rises largely on steam and falls fast.