Oyster Omelet
Mix and cook Plain Omelet. Fold in one pint oysters, parboiled, drained from their liquor, and cut in halves. Turn on platter, and pour around Thin White Sauce.
A cross-reference recipe: it assumes you already have Farmer's Plain Omelet and Thin White Sauce in front of you. The whole dish turns on how briefly the oysters meet heat.
- Parboil means seconds, not minutesDrop the shucked oysters into their own liquor or lightly salted water and lift them out the moment the edges ruffle, roughly 30 to 60 seconds. Anything longer and they tighten into rubber inside the egg, which is the usual way this dish fails.
- A pint of oystersShucked oysters were sold by liquid measure. A pint is roughly 16 to 20 oysters depending on size, and weighs about a pound with its liquor; drained, rather less. Shucked oysters are still sold by the pint in much of the US.
- Drain them hardHalved oysters carry a surprising amount of water. Let them sit in a sieve, then blot on a towel, or the released liquor will loosen the curd and the omelet will weep on the platter.
- The Plain Omelet referred toFarmer's version is eggs beaten slightly with a little hot water or milk, salt and pepper, cooked in butter in an omelet pan and folded; check the book's own proportions for the egg count. Cook it a shade underdone, since folding in warm oysters carries it further.
- Thin White SauceIn this book, thin white sauce is 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour and 1 cup milk, seasoned. Cook the roux a minute before adding the milk so it does not taste of raw flour, and reserve a spoonful of the oyster liquor to stir in for flavour.
- Pan and heatAn 8- or 9-inch nonstick or well-seasoned skillet over medium heat is the modern equivalent of the iron omelet pan. High heat browns the outside before the centre sets.
- YieldServes two as a lunch or supper dish, three at a stretch. Doubling is better done as two omelets than one large one.
Oysters were cheap protein in nineteenth-century Boston, sold shucked by the pint from barrels and carts, and they turn up throughout Fannie Farmer's book as a stuffing, a stew, a sauce and, here, an omelet filling. The construction is textbook Boston Cooking School: a base preparation (Plain Omelet), a variation folded in, and a standard sauce poured around, all three cross-referenced rather than repeated. That modular habit is often taken to be central to the school's teaching method, and it may be why so many entries in the book read as a single sentence. The dish itself belongs to a family of Anglo-American oyster-and-egg preparations that includes scalloped oysters and oyster patties, all of them relying on a shellfish that was then abundant along the Atlantic coast and is now a comparative luxury.