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Baked Omelet
Mrs. Edward Ely.
Six eggs, two tablespoons of flour, a little salt, one cup of milk; take a little of the milk, and stir the flour into it; add the rest of the milk, and the yolks of the eggs; then beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth, and pour into the flour, milk, and yolks ; put a piece of butter the size of a small egg into an iron spider, and let it get hot, but not so the butter will burn; then pour the mixture in and put in a moderate oven to bake in the spider. It takes about ten minutes to bake. Then slip a knife under and loosen and slip off on a large plate or platter.
A puffed skillet omelet, closer to a Dutch baby or a soufflé omelet than to a folded French one. The whole thing depends on getting air into the whites and not knocking it back out.
- The hinge: fold, don't stirThe original says to "pour" the beaten whites into the yolk-and-flour base, but treat it as folding — a few strokes with a spatula until barely combined, streaks and all. Whisking the whites in flattens the froth and you get a thin baked custard instead of a risen omelet.
- SpiderAn iron spider is a long-handled cast-iron pan, originally footed to stand over coals. A 9- or 10-inch cast-iron skillet is the direct equivalent, and it needs to go from stovetop to oven, which cast iron does well.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature; "moderate" is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. At the lower end of that range expect to run past the ten minutes given, perhaps 12-15; the omelet is done when the center is set and no longer wet when the pan is tilted.
- Butter the size of a small eggAbout 2 tablespoons. Heat it until it foams and smells nutty but is still pale — browned butter here will taste scorched against the mild egg.
- Flour slurryStirring the flour into a few tablespoons of the milk before adding the rest is the whole point of that step: it prevents lumps. Two tablespoons of flour in a cup of milk is a very loose batter, and it should be smooth before the yolks go in.
- Serving and yieldSix eggs feeds three to four. It sinks within a minute or two out of the oven, so have the platter ready and loosen the edge with a knife the moment it comes out, as directed.
- Seasoning"A little salt" for six eggs means roughly half a teaspoon. Chopped herbs, grated cheese or crisp bacon can be scattered over the surface before baking rather than mixed in, which would deflate the batter.
Baked or "puffed" omelets like this one were a standard of late nineteenth-century American household cookery, sitting alongside the plainer fried omelet in many community cookbooks of the period. The added flour and milk are the tell: they stretch a half-dozen eggs into a dish for a family and give the whites something to cling to, so the omelet holds its height a little longer than a pure egg foam would. The Home Cook Book (first published in Chicago in 1874 and reprinted in Canada for years afterward) was compiled from contributions by named local women, which is why this appears as Mrs. Edward Ely's rather than as an anonymous formula. The iron spider named here belongs to the era of cooking over coals; by the 1870s the legs were generally said to be disappearing as ranges with flat tops took over, but the name stuck to the pan long after the feet were gone.