Orange Omelet
3 eggs 1 teaspoon lemon juice 2 tablespoons powdered sugar Few grains salt 2 oranges ½ tablespoon butter 2½ tablespoons orange juice Follow directions for Plain Omelet. Remove skin from oranges and cut in slices, lengthwise. Fold in one-third of the slices of orange, well sprinkled with powdered sugar; put remaining slices around omelet, and sprinkle with sugar.
A sweet omelet meant as a light luncheon or dessert course, built on the book's Plain Omelet with orange juice standing in for the usual milk or water. The whole thing lives or dies on how long it stays in the pan.
- The hinge: undercook itThree eggs set fast, so pull the omelet while the centre is still visibly moist and let carryover heat finish it. Overcooking is the one thing that spoils a sweet omelet.
- What "Plain Omelet" means hereFarmer's plain omelet is eggs beaten only until yolks and whites are blended, seasoned, thinned with a little hot liquid, and cooked in butter, the mixture pricked and lifted with a fork as it thickens, then folded and turned out. It is a rolled omelet, not her Puffy Omelet, so do not beat the whites separately.
- Orange juice as the liquidThe juice replaces the milk or water of the plain recipe. Use fresh juice; bottled juice tastes flat against the fresh slices, and concentrate is too sweet once the powdered sugar goes on.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered sugar" meant sugar ground finer than granulated, not necessarily the modern confectioners' grade. Modern confectioners' sugar, the nearest substitute, carries a little cornstarch, harmless here but chalky-looking if you dust too heavily; sift it over the fruit.
- "Remove skin from oranges"Peel, then take off the white pith and the tough membrane so you are left with clean flesh, then cut lengthwise. Two medium navel oranges are right; use a sweet seedless variety, since a juice orange will shed liquid onto the plate.
- The lemon juiceThe recipe lists a teaspoon but never says where it goes; the likeliest place is beaten in with the orange juice, where it offsets the sweetness of the sugared fruit.
- YieldThree eggs serves two as a course of a larger meal, one as a light supper. Sweet omelets do not hold, so cook and serve one pan at a time.
Sweet omelets held a settled place in nineteenth-century menus as an entremets or a light supper dish, and Fannie Farmer's egg chapter follows French practice in treating the plain rolled omelet as a base to be varied with jam, rum, cheese or fruit. That oranges appear as an everyday variation says something about the 1890s: refrigerated rail cars and expanding western groves are often credited with bringing citrus down from a Christmas-stocking luxury toward a more ordinary place on the Boston market, though the picture was uneven, complicated by the Florida freezes of 1894–95. The instruction to reserve two-thirds of the slices as a ring around the platter reflects the era's attention to how a dish was set before the diner, the sugar dusting standing in for a sauce.