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Savory Omelet
Thoroughly beat two heaping tablespoonfuls of Blanchard Evaporated Eggs in six tablespoonfuls water. Add one or two tablespoonfuls milk and salt and pepper to taste. Pour into hot cooking dish greased with butter. When brown roll and hot platter garnished with serve on triangle-shaped buttered toast.
Note: May also be served with grilled ham or bacon, mushrooms or tomato sauce.
A single-serving omelet built on a brand of dried egg that no longer exists. The reconstitution ratio is the only part that needs decoding; everything after it is standard omelet practice.
- Blanchard Evaporated EggsA commercial dried whole egg powder of a kind marketed to households as a substitute for fresh eggs. Modern whole-egg powder works the same way, or simply use two large fresh eggs and skip the water.
- The reconstitution ratioTwo heaping tablespoons of powder to six of water is roughly one part powder to three parts water by volume, which yields about two eggs' worth. Let the mixture stand a minute or two after beating so the powder fully hydrates, otherwise the omelet cooks up grainy.
- YieldThe recipe gives none, but the quantity suggests a single omelet for one. Double for two, but cook the portions separately rather than doubling in one pan.
- "Hot cooking dish"An omelet pan or skillet. The text wants it properly hot before the egg goes in.
- "When brown"Take this loosely. A French-style omelet is rolled while the surface is still slightly moist and barely coloured; browning it firmly, as the text suggests, gives the drier American diner style. Either is defensible, but reconstituted egg toughens faster than fresh, so err toward the shorter cooking time.
- Garbled line"roll and hot platter garnished with serve on triangle-shaped buttered toast" is a printer's scramble. The sense is that the omelet is rolled out onto a hot platter and served with (or on) triangles of buttered toast; the exact intended wording cannot be recovered.
- SeasoningDried egg is blander than fresh and takes more salt than you expect. Season the liquid mixture rather than the finished omelet.
Dried and "evaporated" eggs were a commercial answer to a genuine problem: fresh eggs were seasonal, expensive in winter, and unreliable in transit. Powdered whole egg was produced on an industrial scale from the late nineteenth century onward and became familiar to a much wider public during the Second World War, when shell eggs were rationed in Britain and elsewhere. Recipes naming a specific brand invite comparison with the tradition of manufacturer-sponsored cookery pamphlets, in which a company's product was threaded through otherwise conventional recipes as a form of advertising, though the source of this one is not identified.