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Omelet Au Gratin
1 Teaspoon Cornstarch 1/2 Cup Milk 4 Eggs 1/2 Cup Grated Cheese Season to Taste Mix like ham omelet.
A five-line recipe that assumes you have already read the ham omelet a page or two earlier: beat the eggs, thicken the milk with the cornstarch, combine, cook gently in a buttered pan, fold. The proportions are sound and the whole thing takes under ten minutes once the pan is hot.
- The cornstarch is the pointA teaspoon of starch slaked in the cold milk keeps the half cup of liquid from weeping out of the eggs as they set. Whisk it into the milk before it meets the eggs, or you will be picking out lumps.
- "Mix like ham omelet"The recipe it points to isn't reproduced here, so the method has to be inferred: most likely beat the eggs until just blended, stir in the milk mixture and the filling, pour into a buttered pan over moderate heat, lift the setting edges to let raw egg run under, then fold. Nothing in the wording suggests separately whipped whites or baking.
- Heat and panAn 8- to 10-inch skillet over medium-low. Cheese omelets scorch faster than plain ones because the cheese sinks and sticks; keep the heat below the point where the butter browns.
- "Au gratin" in 1900"Au gratin" here -- in American home cookery of this period the phrase was often used loosely to mean little more than "with cheese," though elsewhere it implied a browned crust of crumbs or cheese. If you want the browned top the name suggests to a modern ear, scatter a little extra cheese over the folded omelet and give it thirty seconds under a broiler.
- The cheeseAn American household book of this period means a firm, dry, aged cheddar-type cheese, grated fine. Half a cup grated is roughly 2 oz. Pre-shredded bagged cheese carries anti-caking starch and will not melt as cleanly.
- Season to tasteSalt and pepper are the likely intent, though a little paprika or cayenne would not be out of keeping. Salt the eggs just before cooking rather than well ahead; the cheese is already salty, so go light.
- YieldFour eggs makes one large omelet for two, or two small ones. If you split it, cook them in succession rather than doubling the pan.
Bride's cookbooks appear to have been a commercial genre of sorts in the first decades of the twentieth century, sold to young women setting up house with no cook and often no mother nearby, and their brevity seems deliberate: the compilers apparently assumed a reader who would work straight through a chapter and could be trusted to carry the method from one entry to the next. That is likely why this recipe is four lines of ingredients and a cross-reference. Gratin is generally traced to the French gratter, to scrape, originally the crust scraped from the dish, though by the time it reached American home cookery the word had narrowed in ordinary use to mean simply "with cheese." The small measure of cornstarch looks characteristic of the period as well: starch thickeners were cheap, shelf-stable and, it is often said, promoted by the corn milling companies, and they turn up throughout these books propping up sauces, custards and, as here, an omelet that would otherwise be thin.