Home › Breakfast Dishes › Orange Omelet
Orange Omelet
Two eggs, the whites beaten very stiff. Into the dish with the yolks beaten very light, put two tablespoonfuls of orange juice, half a teaspoonful of grated orange peel and two teaspoonfuls of sugar. Beat all well together, fold in lightly the whites of the eggs, cook, fold, and turn out like light omelet.
A sweet souffle-style omelet for two eggs, meant to be eaten the moment it leaves the pan. The whole thing hinges on how briefly it cooks.
- Fold, do not stirOnce the stiff whites go into the yolk mixture, use a spatula and as few strokes as possible. Any beating at this stage collapses the foam and you get a flat sweet scrambled egg.
- Pan and heatA 7-8 inch nonstick or well-seasoned skillet over medium-low, with about a teaspoon of butter. Too hot and the sugar in the mixture browns before the centre sets.
- TimingA few minutes only, until the edges are set and the top is still visibly moist, then fold and slide out. Cooking it through gives a dry, rubbery result; the residual heat finishes it on the plate. Covering the pan is a modern convenience, not something the recipe calls for.
- "Cook, fold, and turn out like light omelet"The recipe leans on a general omelet method presumably given elsewhere in the book, which is not reproduced here; the usual reading is that the mixture is folded over itself as it leaves the pan rather than flipped.
- Orange juiceTwo tablespoons is roughly the juice of half a medium orange. Fresh juice matters here since it is the only flavour besides the zest; bottled juice tastes flat against so little sugar.
- Zest"Grated orange peel" means the coloured zest only, taken off before you cut the orange for juice. Grate down into the white pith and it turns bitter.
- YieldTwo eggs make one generous serving or two small ones. The recipe scales, but beyond four eggs the foam is hard to fold and cook evenly in one pan; make two omelets instead.
Sweet omelets sat comfortably in the breakfast chapter of American and English cookbooks through the nineteenth century, when the line between egg dish and dessert was drawn less firmly than it is now; a similar mixture served after dinner with a dusting of sugar might be called an omelette soufflée. Beating whites and yolks separately and folding them together was already well established in nineteenth-century English and American cookery, and the cooking-school movement of the 1870s-1890s is the world the Twentieth Century Cook Book belongs to. Oranges say something about the period too: by 1900 California and Florida fruit was moving by rail in quantity, so a recipe calling for the juice and peel of a fresh orange at breakfast was less of a luxury than it had been a generation earlier.