Puffy Omelet
4 eggs 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 2 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 tablespoon corn starch 1/2 cup milk or half milk and half water Separate eggs; mix salt, pepper, baking powder, corn starch and milk with yolks of eggs. Beat whites until light though not dry and mix in well with yolks. Put into greased hot frying pan and cook slowly until well puffed up. Dry out in oven, fold over in half and serve immediately on hot platter, or if desired serve with the following tomato sauce. The sauce should be added before omelet is folded:
A separated-egg omelet from a baking powder company's promotional cookbook, which explains the two ingredients no French cook would recognize in one. It works, but the handling of the whites is what decides the result.
- Fold, do not mix"Mix in well with yolks" will cost you the puff if taken literally. Fold the beaten whites into the yolk base in two or three additions with a spatula, stopping while a few streaks remain.
- Whites "light though not dry"Soft peaks that just hold their shape. Whites beaten to stiff, dry, grainy peaks cannot stretch and will collapse or weep in the pan.
- The baking powder and cornstarchBoth are there because the book was published to sell Royal Baking Powder. The cornstarch stabilizes and the powder adds a little lift, but properly beaten whites will puff a four-egg omelet on their own. If you keep the baking powder, cook promptly; it starts working the moment it hits the wet batter.
- Pan and heatAn 8- to 10-inch skillet, buttered, over low to medium-low heat. "Cook slowly" is the instruction that matters: high heat sets and browns the bottom before the interior has risen.
- "Dry out in oven"The book gives no temperature or time. A moderate oven, and only long enough for the center to set and stop wobbling; check early. Use an ovenproof or cast-iron skillet, or the handle will not survive.
- Milk and waterHalf milk, half water gives a lighter, less custardy omelet. Whole milk alone gives a richer, slightly denser one. The recipe treats them as interchangeable.
- The missing sauceThe text ends mid-sentence because the tomato sauce recipe followed on the page. Any plain tomato sauce serves; spoon it over the flat omelet before folding, and keep it thick so it does not soak the interior.
- Yield and timingServes two generously, three modestly. Puffy omelets deflate within a minute or two of leaving the oven, so have the platter hot and everyone seated.
The New Royal Cook Book belongs to a genre that dominated American home cooking between roughly 1890 and 1930: the free or near-free booklet issued by a manufacturer, in which every recipe finds a reason to call for the company's product. Royal Baking Powder is often said to have been among the more aggressive practitioners, and its books put baking powder into things that had never needed it, omelets among them. The puffy or souffle omelet itself long predates the leavening: separating the eggs, beating the whites, and finishing the omelet in the oven is a French technique described in nineteenth-century cookbooks well before chemical leaveners were in general kitchen use. What the booklet adds is the cornstarch and the two teaspoons of powder, which is to say the sales pitch.