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Cream Omelet
Crumble and soak two slices of bread in a cup of milk while you are beating six eggs in a separate pan; then add a heaping teaspoon of butter. Pour the milk into the eggs and mix well, and season with salt, pepper and chopped onions or onion tops. Bake quickly in a biscuit-pan in a hot oven and when done roll the same as you would a jelly roll.
This is a baked sheet omelet rather than a pan omelet, and it behaves more like a savory roulade. The original assumes you know what a biscuit-pan is and how hot your range runs, so both need pinning down.
- The hinge: do not overbakeThe roll only works while the egg is still supple. Pull the pan when the surface is set and just barely dry in the center; a thin egg sheet may need only ten minutes or so, and a few minutes past that gives you a sheet that cracks along every fold.
- "Hot oven"In this period that generally means somewhere around 400-450F. For a shallow egg custard, set the oven at 425F and watch it from ten minutes on, since a thin layer of egg goes from set to leathery quickly.
- Biscuit-panA shallow rimmed sheet pan, not a muffin tin. A quarter-sheet pan (roughly 9 by 13 inches) gives the right thickness for six eggs. Butter it well and line it with parchment.
- The breadTwo slices of plain white sandwich bread, torn small. It should collapse into the milk completely, so soak it while you beat the eggs and mash out any lumps before combining.
- Butter measurementA heaping teaspoon is closer to two level teaspoons. Melt it and beat it in with the milk rather than dropping it in cold, or it stays as a slick on the surface.
- Onion topsScallion greens. Two tablespoons, chopped fine, is plenty for six eggs.
- Rolling itLoosen the edges with a knife, turn the sheet out onto a clean towel or fresh parchment, and roll from a short side while it is still hot. It firms as it cools and will hold its shape for slicing.
- YieldSix eggs feeds four as a main course with toast, or six or seven if it is sliced into rounds as part of a larger breakfast.
The Butterick Cook Book belongs to the publishing empire built around Butterick's paper dress patterns and the magazine The Delineator, which sold homemaking instruction to the same middle-class readers who bought the patterns. "Cream omelet" here seems not to mean cream in the ingredients but the soft, custardy texture the soaked bread and milk produce, though the book does not say so; the technique of extending a few eggs with bread and dairy, then baking rather than pan-frying, appears often enough in American cookbooks of the period to look familiar, and one can imagine it let a cook feed a table from a single oven pan instead of turning out omelets one at a time. Rolling the finished sheet like a jelly roll reflects how much of that era's home baking vocabulary came from cake: the writer assumes any reader knows the jelly-roll motion without further explanation.