Home › Egg Dishes and Omelets › Bread Omelet
Bread Omelet
Prepare one tablespoon of grated and sifted bread and soak it in milk, water, cream, white wine, gravy, lemon juice, brandy or rum, according to whether the omelet is to be sweet or savory. Thoroughly beat together four eggs with a little pepper and salt; now add the bread and beat constantly (or the omelet will be crumbly) until the frying-pan is buttered and made thoroughly hot; pour in the omelet, cook till set; turn it on a dish, fold double and serve. For a sweet omelet stale sponge cake, grated biscuit or pound cake may be used in place of bread and lumps of currant jelly should decorate it. Sift granulated sugar over it when served.
A single tablespoon of crumb in four eggs is a binder, not a filler: it holds the omelet together and gives it a slightly firmer, more sliceable body than eggs alone. The instruction that matters is to keep beating right up to the moment the eggs hit the pan.
- Grated and sifted breadThis is fine dry breadcrumbs from stale bread with the crust removed, pushed through a sieve. Coarse fresh crumbs or packaged seasoned crumbs will read as lumps.
- How much soaking liquidThe recipe gives none. One to two teaspoons is enough to soften a tablespoon of dry crumb; the mixture should be a damp paste, not a slurry, or the eggs will loosen and weep.
- Beat constantlySoaked crumb tends to sink as soon as you stop, which is the likeliest explanation for the crumbliness the original warns about: the eggs set around pockets of bread rather than through them.
- Grated biscuitIn this sweet context it most likely means a hard, dry sweet biscuit or rusk, closer to a modern shortbread or zwieback than to a Southern baking-powder biscuit. Stale sponge or pound cake behaves the same way.
- Pan and heatAn 8-inch skillet over medium-high, generously buttered and hot enough that the eggs set at the edge on contact. Four eggs in a larger pan spread too thin to fold.
- Cook till setRoughly two to three minutes in a hot pan. The original asks for it set before turning out; folding it double will carry any residual cooking off the heat.
- The brandy and rum optionSpirits used as the soaking liquid leave a distinct flavor, and not all of the alcohol will cook off in so short a cooking time. Use them only for the sweet version, and stay at the low end of the quantity.
- YieldFour eggs makes one omelet serving two, or one generous single portion. Do not scale past six eggs in one pan; make two omelets instead.
Bread omelets belong to a long European tradition of extending eggs with whatever dry crumb the kitchen already had, and they are often said to appear in English and American cookery books of the nineteenth century alongside omelets bulked out with rice, potato or grated cheese. What is striking in this Butterick version is the list of soaking liquids i gravy at one end, brandy and lemon juice at the other i which treats the omelet as a single technique that swings sweet or savory depending on a spoonful of liquid. The sweet omelet, sugared and dotted with currant jelly, has since almost entirely vanished from American tables, surviving mainly in the French omelette soufflee and in jam-filled pancakes. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, issued its cook book in 1911, and its instructions turn on using up stale bread and yesterday's cake rather than throwing them out.