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Cheese Omelet
Melt one tablespoon butter; add four eggs slightly beaten, four tablespoons milk, one half teaspoon salt, one cup grated cheese. Cook like a French omelet over hot water. Serve with or without tomato sauce.
A chafing-dish omelet, meant to be made at the table in the blazer pan set over its hot-water bath. The water bath is the whole point of the method and also the reason it behaves differently from a skillet omelet.
- "Over hot water" means a double boilerThe chafing dish had two pans: the blazer, which went directly over the flame, and the hot-water pan beneath it. Set a bowl or the top of a double boiler over simmering water and you have the same gentle, indirect heat.
- "Cook like a French omelet"In period usage that meant stirring and lifting the setting curd with a fork or spoon until it thickened, then rolling or folding it out. Over water this takes several minutes rather than the minute or two a hot pan needs, and it produces something closer to soft scrambled eggs than a browned omelet.
- The hinge: keep the water below a boilA hard boil under the pan drives the eggs past coagulation into curds weeping liquid, and the cheese turns stringy and greasy. Hold the water at a bare simmer and pull the pan off while the center is still glossy.
- One cup grated cheeseThat is roughly 3 to 4 oz, a heavy proportion for four eggs. The book does not say which cheese; a period recipe of this kind would most likely mean a firm aged Cheddar or an American "store cheese."
- Add the cheese lateThe original folds everything in at once, which works over water but gives the cheese a long time to break. Stirring half in at the start and scattering the rest over the surface at the end keeps the texture smoother.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon plus a cup of aged cheese is assertive. Taste the cheese first and cut the salt to a quarter teaspoon if it is sharp.
- Tomato sauceThe sauce implied is probably a plain cooked tomato sauce thickened with butter and flour rather than a long-simmered Italian one. A thin, brothy tomato sauce serves the same purpose.
- YieldFour eggs and this much cheese feeds two as a light supper, or four as one course of a larger chafing-dish spread.
Lowney's Cook Book was published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and compiled by Maria Willett Howard — a manufacturer's cookbook that, chocolate chapters aside, functions as a general household manual. The "over hot water" method fits a genuine craze: from the 1890s into the 1910s the spirit-lamp chafing dish was fashionable equipment in the American middle-class household, associated with late suppers, bachelor apartments and entertaining without a cook in the room. Cheese and eggs suited it because both cook quickly, need no oven, and tolerate the low indirect heat of a hot-water pan — and chafing-dish chapters of the period commonly include some version of a cheese omelet alongside Welsh rarebit and creamed oysters.