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Quick Bread Omelet
3 eggs cup soft breadcrumbs Dash of cayenne 5 tablespoonfuls white sauce No. I (see page 67) Salt and pepper Make the white sauce and pour while hot over bread-crumbs, mixing and mashing them well.
Beat yolks of eggs until thick, and stir them, with the extra seasoning, into the white sauce mixture:
Cut and fold in the stiffly beaten whites. Have ready a hot, buttered frying-pan, turn in omelet, and cook lightly. Set pan in oven to dry off top of omelet, turn out on warm platter, and serve at once.
A bread panade omelet — closer to a soufflé than to a French rolled omelet, and it depends entirely on how gently you treat the beaten whites. Two things in the original need filling in: the crumb quantity has dropped out of the text, and the white sauce lives on another page.
- The missing crumb measureThe line reads "cup soft breadcrumbs" with the fraction lost in printing. Judging by the 5 tablespoons of sauce and three eggs, half a cup of soft fresh crumbs is the sensible reading; a full cup gives a heavy, bready result unless you loosen it with a little more sauce.
- White sauce No. 1The recipe sends you to page 67 for it. In many books of the period the numbered sauces are graded by thickness, and No. 1 is often the thinnest, but check the page rather than assume: a thin sauce of about 1 tablespoon each butter and flour cooked together and whisked into 1 cup of milk, simmered until it coats a spoon, will serve here. You only need 5 tablespoons, so make a small batch and use it hot, as instructed, so it softens the crumbs properly.
- Soft crumbs, not dry"Soft breadcrumbs" means the crumb of day-old bread torn or rubbed by hand, not the sandy dried crumbs sold for coating. Dried crumbs will drink the sauce and turn the base to paste.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirEverything rests on the whites. Beat them until they hold a firm peak, then cut and fold them into the crumb base in two additions with a spatula. Stirring collapses the foam and you get a flat pancake instead of a puffed omelet.
- Pan and heatUse a buttered skillet that can go into the oven, over medium heat. "Cook lightly" means only a few minutes, until the underside is set and pale gold — the top will still be wet.
- Finishing in the ovenThe recipe gives no temperature, only "set pan in oven to dry off top of omelet". A moderate oven (around 350F) works; give it only as long as it takes for the surface to dry and spring back. Longer and the eggs weep and the omelet deflates on the platter.
- Serving and yieldServes two as a light supper or three at breakfast. It falls within a minute or two of leaving the oven, so have the platter warm and the table ready, as the recipe says.
- SeasoningThe dash of cayenne is not decorative — the crumbs and milk are bland, and the salt and pepper should be judged after the sauce and crumbs are combined, when you can taste the actual base.
This belongs to a long line of bread-thickened egg dishes that stretch back through the French omelette soufflée and the panade — the paste of bread and liquid that cooks have used for centuries to stretch eggs, bind forcemeats and lighten puddings. A book that turns to left-overs is a document of household economy. The white sauce, kept numbered and standardised as a numbered recipe, was the workhorse of the period's cookery — the same base thinned for soups, thickened for croquettes, and here used to turn dry crumbs into something that will hold air. The result is a dish that stretches a few eggs into a modest supper, which is precisely the point of the volume it sits in.