Jelly Omelet
Mix and cook Plain Omelet, omitting pepper and one-half the salt, and adding one tablespoon sugar. Spread before folding with jam, jelly, or marmalade. Fold, turn, and sprinkle with sugar. 4 eggs ½ cup milk
A sweet variant of Fannie Farmer's Plain Omelet, written in the shorthand of a book that assumed you had already read the master recipe a few pages earlier. The whole dish takes about five minutes once the pan is hot.
- The base you are referred toPlain Omelet in this book is 4 eggs beaten with ½ cup milk, seasoned with salt and pepper and cooked in butter in a hot pan. Here you drop the pepper, halve the salt, and beat in a tablespoon of sugar.
- Sugar changes the pan behaviourSweetened egg browns and sticks faster than plain. Keep the heat at medium rather than high and use a generous knob of butter, or the underside colours before the centre sets.
- Fill off the heat, not on itSlide the pan off the burner before spreading the jam. Warm jelly is thin and runs out of the fold; a couple of tablespoons in a stripe down the centre third is enough for four eggs.
- Set, not dryThe top should still look glossy and slightly loose when you fold. Residual heat finishes it, and an overcooked sweet omelet turns leathery and weeps liquid onto the plate.
- "Turn" means turn outIn period usage, to turn an omelet is to invert or slide it from pan to platter, seam side down, not to flip it over in the pan.
- The final sugarSuperfine or confectioners' sugar dissolves and clings; granulated stays gritty. A red-hot poker or skewer laid across the sugared surface to caramelise stripes was a known period trick, and a broiler will do the same job today.
- YieldFour eggs make one omelet serving two, or a single generous breakfast. Do not scale it up in one pan; cook a second omelet instead.
Sweet omelets were standard in nineteenth-century English and American cookery, sitting on the line between egg dish and dessert in a way that has largely disappeared from modern menus. The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) organises its egg chapter as a set of variations on one plain formula, part of Fannie Farmer's larger project of teaching cooking as a system of standard proportions rather than a collection of unrelated dishes, and this entry is brief because it depends on the reader having learned the base. The jam or marmalade filling also suits a household that kept its own preserves through the winter and had jars to use, and an omelet was a quick way to put a spoonful of summer on a cold breakfast table.