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Cheese Omelet
2 eggs ⅛ tablespoon salt Few grains cayenne 1 tablespoon melted butter 1 tablespoon grated cheese Beat eggs slightly, add one-half teaspoon melted butter, salt, cayenne, and cheese. Melt remaining butter, add mixture, and cook until firm, without stirring. Roll, and sprinkle with grated cheese. Serve with Graham bread sandwiches.
This is a chafing-dish omelet, meant to be made at the table over a spirit lamp, and the printed ingredient list has come down to us incomplete. Read the quantities with suspicion before you start.
- The missing eggsThe instructions begin "Beat eggs slightly" but no egg appears in the list, which has apparently lost a line in setting. An omelet of this period would commonly take three or four eggs, and that is roughly the scale the butter and cheese quantities suit.
- A tablespoon of salt is wrongOne tablespoon of salt to three or four eggs is inedible. Farmer's plain omelet calls for about half a teaspoon; assume the compositor set "tablespoon" where "teaspoon" or less was meant and salt to taste.
- Chafing-dish heatHeat -- The direction is to cook without stirring until firm. On a modern burner use medium-low; egg set fast over high heat turns tough and weeps.
- "Roll"When the surface is just set and still glossy, tip the pan and turn the omelet over on itself onto the plate, seam down, then scatter grated cheese over the hot top so it softens.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" in this period would ordinarily mean a dry aged Cheddar, sold as American or factory cheese and grated fine. Anything that grates to a powder works; pre-shredded cheese with anti-caking starch will not melt as cleanly.
- Graham bread sandwichesGraham bread is a whole-wheat loaf made with coarse unsifted flour, named for Sylvester Graham. Thin buttered slices of a dense wholemeal bread give the same effect.
- YieldOne omelet at this scale serves one generously or two lightly.
The chafing dish had a genuine vogue in American households in the 1890s, and Fannie Farmer wrote at length on chafing-dish cookery. A tinned or silver pan over a spirit lamp let a hostess cook at the table without a servant, which suited late suppers after the theatre, Sunday evening meals when the kitchen was cold, and college rooms and boarding houses where there was no stove at all. The repertoire was accordingly narrow and quick: creamed oysters, welsh rarebit, lobster Newburg, and eggs in every form, since eggs set in a few minutes and forgive an audience. The suggested Graham bread on the side reflects the other current running through the book, the late-nineteenth-century American enthusiasm for coarse whole-wheat flour promoted by the dietary reformer Sylvester Graham a generation or two earlier.