Rice Omelet
1 cup milk 3 eggs 1 cup cold boiled rice 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons butter Warm the milk in a double boiler; add the rice and one tablespoon of butter; mix thoroughly; then add the eggs, well-beaten and seasoning. Melt the other tablespoon of butter in a fryingpan and when hot turn into it the rice mixture. Let it brown slightly; put in the oven until it is "set"; fold over and serve garnished with parsley.
A leftover-rice omelet in the old sense: an egg mixture set in a skillet, finished in the oven, then folded. It behaves more like a loose frittata than a French omelet.
- The hinge: cool the rice-milk mixtureWarm the milk and rice, but let the mixture drop below scalding before the beaten eggs go in, and stir the eggs in briskly. Add them to hot milk and you get threads of cooked egg instead of a smooth custard.
- Oven temperatureMrs. Fryer gives none; the recipe says only to put the pan in the oven. Around 350F will set the eggs through in roughly 10 to 15 minutes without souffleing them or drying the edges.
- Use an ovenproof panThe recipe moves straight from stovetop to oven, so a cast-iron or other all-metal skillet is required. Eight or nine inches suits this quantity; a wider pan gives a sheet too thin to fold.
- "Cold boiled rice"Plain rice cooked in water, chilled, and separated with a fork. Day-old rice is drier and holds its grains; freshly cooked hot rice will slacken the mixture and the omelet will not fold cleanly.
- Brown slightly, then stopTwo or three minutes over medium heat is enough to set and color the bottom. The oven does the rest, and the top should still look barely moist when you take it out, since it firms as it rests.
- FoldingLoosen the whole round with a spatula and fold it in half in the pan. If it tears, serve it in wedges from the skillet; nothing is lost but the shape.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of salt covers three eggs, a cup of milk and a cup of rice; taste and add more if you want it. Pepper, grated cheese, or chopped ham would not be out of place.
- YieldThree or four servings as a light supper or breakfast dish, two if it is the whole meal.
Rice omelets belong to the large family of American "made-over" dishes, in which yesterday's boiled rice, potatoes, or bread was folded into eggs and milk and sent back to the table as something new. Loose-leaf cookbooks like Mrs. Fryer's, sold in binders so a housekeeper could add and rearrange pages, have egg chapters full of these extenders. The technique of starting a bound egg mixture on the range and finishing it in the oven is the same one behind the frittata and the Spanish tortilla, and the instruction to fold it over is a nod to the French omelet, though with a cup of rice in it the dish is closer in body to a baked pudding than to anything rolled out of a copper pan.