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Creamy Omelet
6 eggs 1½ cups white sauce II (see page 29). 3 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon salt teaspoon pepper Make either French or Puffy omelet, using white sauce instead of water. Pour another half cup white sauce around it before serving, after it has been placed on a hot platter.
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have already read the book's French omelet, puffy omelet and white sauce recipes a few pages earlier. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete and partly garbled, so a few numbers have to be supplied from ordinary practice.
- Missing quantitiesThe list gives butter, salt and pepper but no eggs or liquid, and the pepper amount appears to have lost its fraction in printing (an eighth or a quarter teaspoon would be usual). A quantity of eggs has to be supplied; four to six for a large pan is a reasonable working figure, though the 3 tablespoons butter and full teaspoon of salt may point to a larger batch.
- White sauce instead of waterThe point of the recipe is the substitution: where a plain omelet is loosened with a tablespoon of water or milk per egg, here you use thin white sauce (butter and flour cooked together, milk whisked in) at about the same volume. Have it warm and smooth, and strain it if there is any lump.
- French versus puffyA French omelet in this period means eggs beaten whole and cooked quickly, rolled or folded. A puffy omelet means yolks and whites beaten separately, started on the stovetop and finished in the oven; the book gives no temperature, and period directions call only for a moderate oven until the omelet is set. The white sauce works in either, though it is likely to make the puffy version more tender and more prone to falling.
- The hinge: heatAn egg mixture enriched with a flour-thickened sauce catches and browns faster than plain egg. Keep the pan at moderate heat, not high, and pull the omelet while the centre is still visibly soft; it will finish setting on the hot platter.
- The finishing sauceThe half cup poured around the omelet should be thin enough to pool rather than sit in a mound. If the sauce has been standing, thin it with a spoonful of milk and reheat it before serving, and pour it around the omelet, not over it, so the surface stays dry.
- Hot platterThe instruction is not decorative. A cold plate chills the underside and makes the sauce set into a skin; warm the platter in the oven while the omelet cooks.
- YieldOn the four to six eggs assumed above, two generous or three modest servings as a main dish. Doubling the eggs in a single pan is unlikely to cook evenly; better to make two omelets.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was one of the free booklets Metropolitan Life Insurance Company distributed to policyholders in the early twentieth century, part of a wider corporate campaign of health and household advice aimed at working families. Economy was part of the point: such advice was as much economic guidance as culinary instruction, teaching households how to hit their protein without buying a joint. The recipe itself is a cream-omelet idea of long standing in French and Anglo-American cookery, where béchamel replaces the liquid in the eggs; the compressed form here — three lines directing you to two other recipes — is typical of these promotional booklets, which had to fit a whole household kitchen into a pamphlet.