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Omelet
Mrs. Midgley.
Six eggs, teacup of milk, pepper and salt; beat yolks and whites separately; add pepper and salt with yolks, then stir in the milk; lastly stir in the whites very lightly; have your pan very hot, put a good bit of butter in your pan, then the mixture. Cook ten minutes, put in the oven for three minutes, slip on a hot plate, and eat.
This is a puffed or soufflé omelet, not the folded French kind, and the separated whites are the whole point. Everything below is aimed at keeping the air in them.
- The hinge: fold, do not stirDespite the word "stir," the beaten whites should be cut and folded into the yolk mixture with a spatula until barely combined, streaks and all. Beat them to soft peaks, not stiff and dry, or they will not fold in without deflating.
- A teacup of milkVictorian teacups ran small; reckon roughly 3/4 cup. The measure is genuinely loose in period books, and with six eggs anything from 1/2 to 3/4 cup will behave. Less milk gives a firmer, higher omelet.
- "Pan very hot" needs qualifyingA puffed omelet burns on the bottom before it sets through if the pan is truly ripping hot. Heat a 10-inch oven-safe skillet over medium, melt the butter until it foams and just stops hissing, then pour in the mixture and drop the heat to medium-low.
- Ten minutes is for a slack fireTen minutes suits a slower fire — the recipe's timing assumes a range surface the cook judged by eye, even though it also calls for a very hot pan. On a modern burner, 4 to 6 minutes over medium-low is usually enough to set the bottom and edges while the centre is still wet.
- The oven finishNo temperature is given; 375F works. Three minutes is optimistic on a hot range and about right in a preheated oven — go until the top is just set and does not wobble in the middle. Overbaking collapses it.
- Butter"A good bit" means 1 to 2 tablespoons. It is doing two jobs: browning the underside and keeping the omelet loose enough to slide out whole.
- Serve at onceThe instruction to slip it onto a hot plate and eat is not padding. A soufflé omelet begins sinking within a minute of leaving the oven.
- YieldSix eggs serves three as a main dish, four as part of a larger breakfast.
Nineteenth-century North American cookbooks distinguished between the plain omelet, in which whole eggs were beaten together, and this raised or "puffed" version with the whites whipped separately — a technique it shares with the sweet soufflé. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Toronto in the 1870s as one of the earliest charitable community cookbooks in Canada, is built almost entirely from contributions like Mrs. Midgley's: brief, assured, written by a contributor who assumed her reader already knew how a range behaved. The terseness is characteristic of the genre. Fundraising cookbooks collected what neighbours actually cooked, not what a professional would dictate, and the vagueness of "a good bit of butter" and "a teacup of milk" is a fair record of how home cooking was transmitted before standardized measuring cups became widespread in the 1890s.