Oyster Omelet
Mix and cook Plain Omelet. Fold in one pint oysters, which have been boiled and drained from their liquor, and cut in halves. Turn on platter and pour around white sauce.
A short recipe that assumes you have the book's Plain Omelet in front of you and know what a white sauce is. Two points decide whether it works: how long the oysters cook, and how dry they are when they go in.
- Do not boil the oystersDo not overcook the oysters -- cooked only until the edges ruffle, about a minute in their own liquor over moderate heat, they stay tender; held at a boil for several minutes they tighten and shed water into the eggs. The book's own word is "boiled", so treat this as modern practice rather than a gloss on what the author meant.
- A pint of oystersShucked oysters were sold by liquid measure. Counts per pint vary widely by grade, from around twenty large oysters to thirty or more smaller ones, and a pint drains to roughly a pound. That is generous filling for a single omelet; half a pint makes a better-balanced dish.
- Dry them before foldingDrain in a sieve, then blot on a towel. Any retained liquor will break the set curd and leave a grey pool on the platter. Reserve the strained liquor for the sauce.
- The plain omelet baseThe book's Plain Omelet is not given here, so check its own quantities before scaling. Plain omelets in books of this period are generally the pan-set and folded kind rather than the French rolled omelet: eggs with a little milk or water, salt and pepper, cooked in butter over moderate heat until nearly firm.
- White sauce means bechamelWhite sauce -- in books of this period this is the plain butter-flour-milk sauce, close to a bechamel: roughly a tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of milk, cooked a couple of minutes to lose the raw flour taste, salt, and nutmeg or cayenne if liked. Substituting a few tablespoons of the reserved oyster liquor for milk suits the dish.
- SeasoningOysters and bechamel are both mild. Season the eggs properly and finish the sauce with lemon juice or a little pepper, or the dish reads flat.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; on a six-egg omelet it would serve about three as a light main course, or four at a breakfast table with other dishes. Serve at once; a filled omelet held warm weeps.
Oysters were cheap protein in American cities through the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, hauled inland by rail packed in ice and barrels, and cookbooks of the period treat them as an everyday extender rather than a luxury: oyster stew, oyster pie, scalloped oysters, and combinations with eggs like this one. The Bride's Cook Book belongs to a genre of small volumes sold to new housekeepers, built on cross-references and short entries that assume the reader will master a handful of base preparations, here a plain omelet and a white sauce, and then vary them. That structure is the reason this recipe is three sentences long. The collapse of the Atlantic oyster beds from overharvesting and pollution, generally traced to the early decades of the twentieth century, is what turned dishes like this from thrift into something closer to an occasion.