Plain Omelet
Beat 3 eggs with 3 tablespoons milk or cold water; add 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon pepper, and mix. Melt 1 teaspoon bacon drippings or other fat in hot frying pan; pour in eggs; lift edges of omelet, allowing thin portions to run underneath, shaking pan until egg is set; when brown underneath, fold over and turn out on hot platter. Sprinkle with 1 teaspoon chopped parsley.
A three-egg French-style omelet, written when omelets were routinely browned rather than kept pale. Nothing here needs conversion, but a few habits have changed.
- Heat is the hingeThe pan should be hot enough that the eggs set at the edges within a few seconds, but not so hot that the base colors before the center thickens. Medium to medium-high on a modern burner, in a 8- to 9-inch nonstick or well-seasoned pan for three eggs.
- Milk or waterWater gives a lighter, slightly puffier omelet because it turns to steam; milk gives a softer, richer set and browns faster from the milk sugars. The recipe treats them as interchangeable, and for practical purposes they are.
- One teaspoon of fat is thinIt would have gone further in a well-seasoned iron pan than in most modern ones. A tablespoon of butter or drippings coats the surface more reliably and improves the flavor.
- "When brown underneath"This recipe wants a colored underside. Current practice often pulls the omelet while the surface is still glossy and just barely loose, since carryover heat finishes it on the platter. Cook to whichever you prefer, but here browning is being used as the doneness cue.
- BeatingBeat only until the yolks and whites are combined and no streaks remain. Air beaten in collapses in the pan and gains you nothing.
- YieldThree eggs makes one generous omelet or two modest portions. Omelets do not scale well; for four people make two omelets in sequence rather than doubling into one pan.
The New Royal Cook Book was published by the Royal Baking Powder Company, one of a long line of promotional cookbooks American manufacturers gave away or sold cheaply to put their product in the hands of home cooks. Such books padded their leavened cakes and biscuits with a full range of everyday household recipes, which is why a plain omelet appears in a book whose commercial purpose was baking powder. Lifting the edges to let raw egg run underneath is the technique of the folded omelet as it was taught in nineteenth-century English and American cookery writing, and it has not meaningfully changed since. Bacon drippings as the default fat is the period detail: rendered pork fat was commonly kept in a crock by the stove and used where a later cook would reach for butter or oil.