Oyster Omelet
Make the same as the corn omelet, substituting one dozen finely cbopped oysters for the corn.
A one-line variant that assumes you have the corn omelet in front of you. The base is a plain folded omelet of the period: roughly six eggs beaten with a few tablespoons of milk or cream, salt and pepper, cooked in butter in a heavy skillet and folded over the filling.
- The hinge: drain the oystersChopped oysters carry a lot of liquor, and corn does not. Drain them well and blot them, or the eggs will weep and refuse to set. Save the liquor for a sauce or a stew.
- A dozen oystersShucked, that will be somewhere around three-quarters of a cup to a cup chopped, depending on size; a dozen small Pacific or Kumamoto oysters will give you noticeably less than a dozen standard Eastern ones. The recipe itself specifies nothing beyond the count.
- Cook them barelyChopped raw oysters folded into hot egg need only a minute or two of the omelet's own cooking to firm up. Sautéing them first and then baking the omelet through gives rubbery grit. If you do warm them in butter, stop the moment the edges ruffle.
- Pan and heatA well-seasoned skillet over medium heat. Follow whatever the corn omelet directs; if it is a folded omelet rather than a puffy one, keep the eggs moving with a fork until the curds are just set and still glossy, then add the oysters and fold.
- SeasoningOysters bring their own salt. Season the eggs lightly and finish with pepper, a squeeze of lemon, and chopped parsley if you like. A little cream reduced with the reserved liquor would not be out of keeping, though the recipe calls for no sauce at all.
- YieldThe oysters here are a filling for a single omelet, so expect two servings, or three at a lunch with bread and something green. Two smaller omelets cook better than one large one.
The oyster in an egg dish was unremarkable in American kitchens of the 1900s and 1910s: shucked oysters came by the pint from the fishmonger or in cans, were cheap along the whole Atlantic seaboard and reached well inland by rail, and turn up in the cookbooks of the period fried, scalloped, in patties, in soup, and folded into eggs. Corn and oysters as interchangeable omelet fillings also hints at the season — sweet corn in late summer, oysters traditionally in the months with an R in them, a rule of thumb rather than a rule — so a single page quietly covered much of the year.