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Creamy Omelet
teaspoon pepper 2 tablespoons flour 1 tablespoon butter Melt butter; add flour, milk, and yolks of eggs, beaten until lemon-colored and thick. Beat whites until stiff, cut, and fold into first mixture; add seasonings; pour into buttered pan, and cook as first omelet. Turn on to a hot platter; garnish with white sauce, and parsley.
NOTE. - For a sweet omelet add one fourth cup sugar to the yolks of eggs of above omelet: 6 slices butter toast 6 hard-cooked eggs 2 cups white sauce
This is a souffléd omelet built on a thin white sauce rather than plain beaten egg. The text as printed has lost part of its ingredient list and has run into the start of the next recipe, so read it with that in mind before you begin.
- The ingredient list is incompleteThe quantities of eggs and milk are missing from the surviving text, along with the salt. What survives gives 2 tablespoons flour to 1 tablespoon butter; any milk quantity or egg count you settle on is a reconstruction, not the original.
- The trailing lines are not part of this dish"6 slices butter toast, 6 hard-cooked eggs, 2 cups white sauce" is the ingredient list of the following recipe in the book, almost certainly creamed eggs on toast. Ignore it here.
- "Cook as first omelet"The preceding recipe in the book is being referenced. That recipe is not part of the surviving text, so the cooking method, temperature and timing cannot be recovered from this page.
- Fold, do not stirThe hinge of the dish. The whites carry all the lift; cutting and folding with a spatula keeps the air in, while beating or stirring collapses them and yields a flat, rubbery pancake. Fold until barely combined, streaks of white are acceptable.
- Sauce base must be coolLet the butter-flour-milk mixture cool to warm before the yolks go in, or they may curdle.
- White sauce for garnishThe standard proportion of the period is 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to 1 cup milk, seasoned with salt and pepper, simmered until it coats a spoon.
- YieldA four to six egg omelet of this style serves two, three at a stretch. It must go to the table immediately; a souffléd omelet begins to sink within a minute or two of leaving the oven.
- The sweet variationThe note adds 1/4 cup sugar to the yolks, which makes a dessert omelet. Serve that one without the white sauce and parsley, with jam or a dusting of sugar instead.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like most house-brand cookbooks of its era it surrounded its chocolate recipes with a complete general course in domestic cookery of the sort taught in the Boston cooking schools. A "creamy" or "puffy" omelet, thickened with a small bechamel and lightened with separately beaten whites, was the American cooking-school answer to the French omelette souffle, and it appears in Fannie Farmer and her contemporaries in nearly identical form. The garbled ingredient list here is an artefact of the text as transcribed, in which the recipe's heading and opening lines have been lost and the next recipe's ingredients have run on.