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Cheese Omelet No. 2
Cheese may be introduced into omelets in several ways. An ordinary omelet may be served with thin cheese sauce made in the following proportions: 1 1/2 tablespoons flour 1/4 cup grated cheese 1 cup milk This sauce may also be added to omelets in which boiled rice, or some other nutritious material has been included.
This is less a recipe than a formula: a thin white sauce enriched with cheese, poured over an omelet. The proportions are given but the method is assumed, as it would have been for a cook of the period.
- The missing fatA flour-and-milk sauce of this era is understood to begin with butter — roughly 1 1/2 tablespoons, matching the flour. Cook the roux a minute or two without colouring, then whisk in the milk.
- "Thin" sauce means what it says1 1/2 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk is a deliberately light binding, roughly three-quarters the thickening of a standard medium white sauce. It should coat a spoon thinly and slide off an omelet rather than sit on it.
- Cheese goes in off the heatThe hinge of the dish. Add the grated cheese after the sauce has thickened and the pan is off the burner; held at a simmer, the cheese breaks and the sauce turns grainy and oily.
- Which cheese"Grated cheese" is left unspecified; it would most likely have meant a firm aged Cheddar or a dry factory cheese. A quarter cup grated is about 1 ounce — modest, so use something with real flavour.
- SeasoningNone is specified and the sauce needs it: salt, white pepper, and a scrape of nutmeg or a little dry mustard, which sharpens the cheese without announcing itself.
- YieldOne cup of sauce is enough for a three- or four-egg omelet serving two, with a little over.
- The rice variationFolding cooked rice into the eggs makes a heavier, more filling omelet that wants the sauce to be genuinely thin — thicken any further and the plate becomes stodgy.
Cookbooks of the early twentieth century leaned on cheese and eggs, the two foods that could be argued, in the nutritional language of the day, to carry something like the "nutritive value" of a portion of meat. Recipes like this one are the practical result: a cheap protein sauce ladled over a cheap protein dish, with rice added to stretch it further. The impulse was partly vegetarian conviction and partly economy, and after 1917 partly patriotic, when American households were urged to observe meatless days so that meat could be shipped abroad. The sauce itself is nothing more than a thin b ed by cheese stirred in — and it appears in these books over and over because a cook who learned it once could redeploy it across a whole chapter.