Crumb Omelet
1/2 cup grated bread crumbs 1/2 cup cream 3 eggs Salt and pepper 1/2 teaspoon chopped parsley 1/2 teaspoon chopped onion 1 tablespoon butter Beat the eggs separately and then together; season and add the parsley and onion. Pour the cream over the bread crumbs and mix them with the eggs; empty all into a hot pan in which the butter has already been melted; spread evenly over the pan; brown carefully; fold one half over the other; lift to a hot platter and serve, garnished with parsley or slices of small white onion.
A soft, bread-bound omelet of the sort that stretched three eggs across a family breakfast. The technique is straightforward; the details worth attention are the crumbs and the heat.
- Grated bread crumbsThese are fresh crumbs rubbed from a stale loaf on a box grater, not dry packaged crumbs. Dried commercial crumbs drink up the cream and turn the omelet pasty; tear or grate day-old bread instead, loosely packed.
- CreamPeriod recipes calling simply for "cream" often meant something richer than today's half-and-half, though cookbooks of the era also distinguished thin from thick cream. Either works; with heavy cream the mixture is richer and needs a gentler pan.
- "Beat the eggs separately"This most likely means whites and yolks beaten in separate bowls before being combined, a common instruction of the period, though the phrasing is ambiguous. Handled that way the omelet is lighter than one made from whole eggs beaten together.
- Let the crumbs soakPour the cream over the crumbs and give them five minutes before combining. Dry patches of crumb in the finished omelet are the usual failure here.
- Raw onionHalf a teaspoon of chopped raw onion will still be crunchy and sharp after the short cooking. Mince it very fine, or soften it in the butter first and let the pan cool slightly before the eggs go in.
- Heat and "brown carefully"Medium-low in a 9- or 10-inch pan. The bread and cream make this heavier than a plain omelet, so it wants four to six minutes to set through rather than the fast high-heat treatment; the underside should be golden, not dark.
- FoldingLoosen the whole edge with a spatula before folding, and do it while the top is still slightly moist. A bread-bound omelet cracks if you wait until it is fully dry.
- YieldServes two as a main breakfast dish, or three or four alongside other things.
Crumb omelets belong to a large family of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century egg dishes designed to make a small number of eggs go further: bread, cracker, rice, oatmeal and hominy all turn up bound into omelets in American cookbooks of the period. Eggs were seasonal and their price swung sharply through the year, so a half cup of stale bread and a little cream was ordinary domestic arithmetic rather than a novelty. The separate beating of whites and yolks, an instruction that recurs in these books, descends from the older "puffy" or soufflé form, distinct from the rolled French omelet that later became the default in English-language cooking.