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Omelet (Tablespoons butter tablespoons)
2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 cup milk 6 eggs 1/2 teaspoon salt Put the butter in a pan over the fire; when melted add the flour; mix well; then add the milk gradually, stirring until thick and smooth. Add the salt and set aside to cool. Beat the eggs, yolks and whites separately; fold first yolks and then whites into the cream sauce; pour into a baking dish, and bake in a moderate oven for about fifteen minutes. Serve at once.
This is a puffed or soufflé omelet built on a béchamel base rather than a folded pan omelet, and it behaves like a soufflé: it rises in the oven and begins to sink the moment it leaves.
- Moderate ovenA moderate oven is usually read today as roughly 350-375F. Much hotter and the surface tends to set and brown before the interior expands, so the omelet cracks rather than domes.
- Cool the sauce properlyThe white sauce should be cool enough not to cook the yolks on contact, but not cold and stiff. Lukewarm works well; the recipe says only "set aside to cool."
- Folding order mattersYolks first, then whites in two or three additions. Beat the whites to soft peaks, not stiff and dry, or they will refuse to combine and leave streaks that collapse in the oven.
- The dishA shallow baking dish of about 1 1/2 quarts suits this quantity; the recipe does not specify a size or say to butter it. Too deep and fifteen minutes may leave the centre raw; too wide and it sets flat.
- DonenessFifteen minutes is a starting point. The omelet is done when it is puffed, set at the edges and barely trembling at the centre; a knife slid in should come out with a little moist cling, not liquid.
- Serve at onceNot a flourish but a requirement. The structure is held by air and steam, and it deflates noticeably within two or three minutes of coming out.
- YieldSix eggs and a cup of milk serve four as a main course with bread and salad, or six as part of a larger breakfast.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt for six eggs is modest by current taste. Pepper, grated cheese or chopped herbs folded in with the yolks are all in keeping with the method.
Recipes of this kind sit between the French omelette soufflée and the plain skillet omelet, and cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often printed both under the same heading, distinguishing them only as "puffy" and "plain." The béchamel base does practical work: the flour-and-milk sauce stretches six eggs to feed more people, stabilises the foam so it is harder to ruin, and lets the cook use the oven instead of standing over a pan managing an omelet that must be turned out in seconds.