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Chicken or Tongue Omelet
Mince quite fine one cup of chicken or tongue; in one teacup of cream or milk mix and warm one tablespoon of butter, some salt and pepper and thicken with one large tablespoon of flour. Make a plain omelet and spread on this mixture just before folding it over. Superior to an omelet made with dry, minced chicken.
A filled omelet with a thick cream sauce binding the meat. The recipe assumes you already know the house method for a plain omelet, and it gives no pan size or yield.
- The teacupA teacup in American books of this period is generally smaller than the 8-oz measuring cup, usually reckoned at around 5 to 6 ounces, though period usage varies. Even allowing for the "large" tablespoon of flour the recipe calls for, that much liquid gives a fairly loose sauce; if you want it thick enough to stay put inside the fold, use two.
- Make it a proper rouxAs written the flour goes into warm milk and will lump. Melt the butter, stir in the flour, cook a minute, then add the milk gradually and simmer until it coats a spoon.
- TongueUsually beef tongue, cooked, peeled and cooled, though smaller tongues were also used; a standard cold-larder item in the period and still sold at butchers and Latin and Eastern European markets. Cooked ham or turkey substitutes without complaint.
- Mince, not dice"Quite fine" matters here. Coarse chunks tear the egg when you fold it and roll out of the omelet on the plate.
- Warm the fillingCold filling in a hot omelet leaves the center raw and cools the eggs before they set. Have the sauce hot and the meat stirred into it before the eggs go in the pan.
- The plain omeletThree eggs in a 8-inch pan with a spoonful of butter, over medium heat, is the working scale for this filling. Pull the set edges toward the center, fill while the surface is still glossy, fold, and slide out at once.
- YieldOne cup of meat and the teacupful of sauce is enough for two three-egg omelets, each serving one generously or two lightly. One large omelet for four is harder to manage and more likely to overcook.
The Butterick Publishing Company sold patterns first and domestic advice second, and its cook book offered ways to use up what was left of a joint of meat. Cold roast fowl and boiled tongue were the standing residents of the late-Victorian larder, and a cream sauce was the standard vehicle for turning them into a fresh dish — the same logic that produced creamed chicken on toast, croquettes and patty shells. The final line, comparing this to "an omelet made with dry, minced chicken," may perhaps be read as a quiet correction of an earlier habit, with the sauced version as the refinement being urged. Tongue held its place on English and American tables into the mid-twentieth century before falling out of general use in the English-speaking kitchen, which is why this recipe now reads stranger than it did to its first readers.