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August 4
Menu: Fried Soft Shell Crabs, Sauce Tartare; Hashed Browned Potatoes; Pepper and Cucumber Salad; Cheese Fingers; Apricot Omelet Coffee Apricot Omelet-Cut 6 preserved apricots into dice, and heat up in a little fruit juice. Beat up 5 eggs, add pinch of salt and 1 tablespoon sugar. Melt in an omelet pan or frying pan 2 tablespoons Crisco, when hot pour in beaten eggs and stir over quick fire till they commence to thicken, put in the prepared apricots, then shape quickly into an oval form by folding the ends. Allow the omelet to acquire a golden brown by putting it in the oven, turn out on to a hot dish, dredge with sugar and serve at once.
A sweet folded omelet of the sort served for late breakfast or a light supper course. It moves fast once the eggs hit the pan, so have the apricots warm and the serving dish hot before you start.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and the recipes call for Crisco throughout. For a sweet omelet, 2 tablespoons of butter gives a better flavour and browns more attractively; modern shortening will work but tastes of nothing.
- Preserved apricotsThese are apricots put up in sugar syrup, either home-canned or bought in a tin. Canned apricots in heavy syrup are the direct equivalent; "6 preserved apricots" most likely means six whole fruit, though tinned apricots are commonly packed as halves. Dice them and warm in a few spoonfuls of their own syrup. Fresh apricots are too tart and too wet without stewing first.
- Quick fireMedium-high heat on a burner. The eggs should set at the edges within a few seconds of hitting the pan.
- The hinge: stop stirring early"Till they commence to thicken" means the eggs are still visibly loose and glossy when the fruit goes in. Cook them to firm curds at this stage and the finished omelet will be dry and rubbery after its turn in the oven.
- The oven finishA hot oven, briefly: two to three minutes at most, just long enough to puff the top and colour it. The book gives no temperature. An ovenproof or cast-iron pan is needed; a nonstick handle will not take it.
- Pan sizeFive eggs need a 9- or 10-inch pan. Anything smaller gives a thick omelet that will not fold cleanly around the fruit.
- Dredge with sugarA light dusting of granulated or caster sugar over the top. Period cooks sometimes finished it by laying a hot poker or skewer across the sugar to caramelise stripes; a kitchen blowtorch does the same thing.
- YieldFive eggs serves two generously, three at a push as part of a larger meal.
The Story of Crisco (1913), written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, was the promotional cookbook that introduced American households to hydrogenated cottonseed oil, launched in 1911. Its "Calendar of Dinners" gave a menu for every day of the year, each one quietly routing the cook toward the new fat, cheaper than butter, and, importantly for the period, neutral enough for kosher and for Lenten cooking. A sweet omelet in an August menu is an older idea than the shortening: fruit omelets, dredged with sugar and glazed under heat, run right through nineteenth-century English and French cookery as a light entremets or supper dish, and preserved apricots were the standard filling because they hold their shape where fresh fruit collapses. The date line, August 5, is not a serving suggestion so much as a sales calendar — a year of occasions on which to reach for the tin.