Home › Cakes, Puddings, and Pastry › Fancy French Omelette
Fancy French Omelette
Beat yolks of 4 eggs with the rind of a lemon, rubbed on 2 ounces of loaf sugar, which must be crushed and added, the whites beaten very stiff, 1/4 pound flour, and 1/2 cup of whipped cream. Mix all well, pour into a buttered pan, and bake in a hot oven 5 minutes. Fold it on a plate with a filling of cider apple-sauce, boiled thick, glaze it with sugar and serve.
This is a sweet soufflé omelette baked rather than pan-cooked — closer to a thin sponge than to a breakfast omelette. A few of its terms and proportions need translating.
- Loaf sugar and the lemonLoaf sugar was sold in hard cones and broken up for use; ordinary granulated sugar is the substitute, 2 ounces being about 1/4 cup. Rubbing the whole lemon rind against the lump draws the oil out of the zest into the sugar — the old method for what is now called oleo-saccharum. Finely grated zest stirred into the sugar gets you most of the way there.
- The flour is the odd figureA quarter pound is roughly 1 cup, which is a great deal of flour for four eggs and half a cup of cream. The result is a firm baked sponge sheet, not a fluffy omelette. Taken as written, expect something you can fold without tearing.
- Order of mixingBeat the whites stiff last and fold them in at the end, after the yolk-sugar-flour-cream mixture is combined. The instruction lists them mid-sentence, but folding is what keeps the sheet light.
- "A hot oven"Roughly 400-450F. Five minutes suits that heat for a thin sheet in a shallow buttered pan. Watch it; a minute past done and it will crack when folded.
- Cider apple-sauceApple sauce made with sweet cider in place of water, cooked down until it holds its shape on a spoon. Thin apple sauce will run out of the fold and soak the sponge.
- Glazing with sugarDust the folded omelette with fine sugar and pass it under a very hot broiler for under a minute, or use a kitchen torch. The Victorian tool was a salamander — an iron plate heated red and held over the dish.
- YieldServes three to four as a dessert. It must go to the table at once; the sponge stiffens as it cools and the glaze dulls.
Adelaide Keen's With a Saucepan Over the Sea (1902) collected dishes she presented as gathered from foreign kitchens, and this one belongs to a whole family of nineteenth-century sweet omelettes — omelette soufflée, omelette aux confitures, omelette célestine — that French cookery had made fashionable in English and American households. The distinguishing trick is beating the whites separately so the egg puffs, then filling and folding it like a turnover, sometimes finished with the confectioner's flourish of glazing the top with sugar under a salamander. That the filling here is cider apple-sauce rather than apricot jam is the American note in an otherwise French formula.