Plain Omelet
4 tablespoons hot water 1 tablespoon butter 1½ cups Thin White Sauce Separate yolks from whites. To yolks add salt, pepper, and hot water and beat until thick and lemon-colored. Beat whites until stiff, cutting and folding them into first mixture until they have taken up mixture. Heat omelet pan, and butter sides and bottom. Turn in mixture, spread evenly, place on range where it will cook slowly, occasionally turning the pan that omelet may brown evenly. When well "puffed" and delicately browned underneath, place pan on centre grate of oven to finish cooking the top. The omelet is cooked if it is firm to the touch when pressed by the finger. If it clings to the finger like the beaten white of egg, it needs longer cooking. Fold, and turn on hot platter, and pour around one and one-half cups Thin White Sauce.
Milk is sometimes used in place of hot water, but hot water makes a more tender omelet. A few grains baking powder are used by some cooks to hold up an omelet.
To Fold and Turn an Omelet Hold an omelet pan by handle with the left hand. With a case knife make two one-half inch incisions opposite each other at right angles to handle. Place knife under the part of omelet nearest handle, tip pan to nearly a vertical position; by carefully coaxing the omelet with knife, it will fold and turn without breaking.
Omelet with Meat or Vegetables Mix and cook Plain Omelet. Fold in remnants of finely chopped cooked chicken, veal, or ham. Remnants of fish may be flaked and added to White Sauce; or cooked peas, asparagus, or cauliflower may be added.
This is a puffed or soufflé omelet, not the folded French kind, and it behaves more like a batter than scrambled eggs. A few things in the text need translating.
- The eggs are missing from the listThe ingredient list as printed here is incomplete: the method plainly requires eggs, salt and pepper, none of which appear. Four tablespoons of hot water points to about four eggs (a tablespoon of water per egg), with salt and pepper to taste.
- Thin White SauceIn this book that means 1 tablespoon butter and 1 tablespoon flour cooked together per cup of milk, seasoned with salt. For 1½ cups, scale accordingly; it should coat a spoon thinly, not cling.
- "Place on range where it will cook slowly"A cool spot on a coal range translates to low heat on a burner, roughly 8 to 12 minutes. Rushing it browns the bottom before the interior sets, and the omelet collapses when folded.
- "Centre grate of oven"Middle rack. The book gives no temperature; a moderate oven, in the region of 350F, answers, and two to four minutes is usually enough. The pan handle must be ovenproof, which rules out most plastic-handled nonstick pans.
- The doneness testPress the top lightly; set egg springs back, underdone egg is tacky and clings. If you would rather not touch it, the centre should read 160F. Overcooking past that point dries a puffed omelet very quickly.
- Case knifeA dull-bladed table knife. The point is to slide under the omelet without cutting through it; a flexible offset spatula does the job with less drama.
- Hot water versus milkThe claim holds up. Water turns to steam and lifts the foam, while milk proteins and sugars set firmer and brown faster, giving a denser omelet.
- The baking powderUnnecessary if the whites are beaten to firm, glossy peaks and folded in without deflating them. The 'few grains' the recipe allows will do no harm either way.
- YieldFour eggs feed two people generously, or three at a larger breakfast. The variations give no quantity for the meat or vegetables; keep the addition modest, or the foam cannot carry it.
The puffed omelet had a long run in nineteenth-century American cookery, where it sat somewhere between an omelet and a soufflé and was prized for looking impressive on a platter without demanding the speed and wrist of a French rolled omelet. Fannie Farmer's insistence on hot water rather than milk, and her careful paragraph on folding and turning with a case knife, are characteristic of the Boston Cooking School's method: every step reduced to something a young housekeeper could repeat without a professional cook standing over her. The closing note on "remnants" of chicken, veal, ham or leftover vegetables is equally of its period, when a book like this was expected to account for yesterday's dinner as a matter of course rather than as thrift chic.