Home › Sandwiches › Cup Omelet
Cup Omelet
Butter half dozen custard cups and fill lightly with equal quantities of stale bread crumbs and cold meat chopped fine and well seasoned. Beat three eggs, one cup ful of milk, and divide among the cups adding more milk if required. Set the cups in a pan of hot water and bake in a moderate oven until firm in the center. Turn out on a platter and mix with tomato or white sauce.
A leftovers dish in the shape of a savoury custard, baked in a water bath and unmoulded. The whole thing turns on the oven being gentle enough that the eggs set rather than curdle.
- The hinge: gentle heatEgg and milk set smoothly at around 175-180F internal; pushed hotter they tighten and weep, and the unmoulded custards collapse into watery crumbs. The pan of hot water is not optional, and the oven should stay moderate throughout.
- "A moderate oven"Conventionally taken as about 350F (sources of the period range roughly 325-375). At that heat six filled cups in a water bath will likely need somewhere around 25-35 minutes, until the centres are just firm and a knife comes out clean.
- Custard cupsStandard 5-6 oz ramekins are the modern equivalent. Butter them generously and to the rim, since the custards are meant to be turned out whole.
- The water bathUse a deep roasting pan and pour boiling water to come halfway up the cups. Add the water after the pan is in the oven if it makes the transfer easier.
- Stale bread crumbsThis means dry crumbs from day-old bread, not packaged crumbs and not fresh soft crumbs. Dry crumbs absorb the custard; commercial dried crumbs are finer and denser and will give a pasty result, so grate your own.
- Cold meatAny cooked leftover: roast beef, ham, chicken, tongue, chopped fine rather than ground. The recipe calls for the mixture to be "well seasoned", so season and taste it before filling the cups: a bland filling gives a bland custard.
- "Adding more milk if required"Three eggs to one cup of milk is on the firm side of a custard, and dry crumbs will drink a good deal of it. Aim for cups that are moist and loose when filled rather than stiff; a little extra milk is usually needed.
- "Mix with" the sauceThe sense is almost certainly that the sauce is poured over and around the turned-out custards on the platter (possibly a slip for "mask with"). Have the sauce hot and ready before the cups come out of the oven.
- YieldSix cups, enough for three as a light main course or six as a first or supper course.
Baked savoury custards of this kind were a staple of the American "made dish" tradition, in which cookbook writers of the 1890s and 1900s gave considerable attention to using up cold roast meat without disguising it as hash. The name is loose: an omelet in this period seems to have covered a wide range of egg dishes, including baked and steamed ones, so a mixture cooked in cups and unmoulded could still be called one. The water-bath method is often associated with professional practice, where the bain-marie had long been the standard way to keep egg mixtures from curdling in an oven whose temperature could not be read off a dial.