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Washington Omelet
Let one tea-cup milk come to a boil, pour it over one tea-cup bread-crumbs and let stand a few minutes. Break six eggs into a bowl; stir (not beat) till well mixed; then add the milk and bread; mix; season with salt and pepper and pour into a hot skillet, in which a large tablespoon of butter had been melted; fry slowly, cut in squares, turn, fry to a delicate brown, and serve at once.- Mrs. D. Buxton.
A bread-thickened skillet omelet of the sort common before folded French omelets became the American standard. The whole point is low heat and patience — this mixture is heavy and will scorch before it sets if the pan is hot.
- Teacup measurePeriod recipes commonly reckon a teacup at about 6 fl oz rather than a full 8-oz cup, though the book itself gives no definition. Using about ¾ cup milk and ¾ cup crumbs, the mixture should be loose and pourable, not stiff.
- Bread-crumbsThis means soft crumbs torn or rubbed from the inside of a day-old loaf, not dry packaged crumbs. Dry crumbs absorb far more liquid and will give you a dense pudding — if that is all you have, use about half the quantity.
- Stir, do not beatThe instruction is deliberate; the recipe puts "(not beat)" in parentheses. Eggs stirred only until yolks and whites are combined tend to set into a tender curd, while beating works in air, which is presumably what the writer wanted to avoid in a mixture already loosened with milk and bread.
- HeatMedium-low, and give it time — five to eight minutes before the underside is set. "Fry slowly" is the hinge of the recipe; the milk and crumbs mean sugars that brown fast and burn faster.
- Cutting and turningRather than folding, the set sheet is scored into squares in the pan and each piece flipped. A thin fish spatula does this better than a spoon, and the squares should be no bigger than about 3 inches or they break.
- PanAn 8- to 9-inch skillet suits six eggs. Well-seasoned cast iron or nonstick; a bare stainless pan will grip the bread and tear the squares.
- YieldServes three or four as a breakfast or supper dish. It is filling in a way a plain omelet is not.
Bread-and-milk omelets like this one were a thrifty middle ground between eggs and a pudding: the panada of soaked crumbs stretched six eggs to feed four and gave body to a dish that had to hold on a platter while a family came to table. Names attached to such dishes in nineteenth-century American cookbooks were often decorative -- "Washington" here appears to signal nothing more than patriotic gloss, the same impulse that gave the period Washington pie and Washington cake, and no link to the president's table is documented. Compiled and community cookbooks of the period are full of such attributions to named contributors; Mrs. D. Buxton's version survives because someone wrote it down for one of them.