Baked Tomato Omelet: It's got layers!

Sometimes it's so hard to imagine how a recipe would come out that you just have to make it.

Baked Tomato Omelet 6 eggs, separated 2 cups milk 1 tbsp butter 1 tbsp flour ¾ cup canned tomato soup Pinch of salt Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9" round pan. Warm the milk and melt the butter in it. Or, put the butter and milk in a large bowl or cup. Microwave them, stirring after every 20 seconds, until the butter melts. Be sure that the bowl has a lot of empty space in case the milk boils up. Beat the egg yolks in a large bowl, then whisk in the flour. Add salt. Slowly pour in the milk mixture, whisking hard the whole time. Beat the egg whites almost until stiff. They should rise up in peaks, but not quite hold a point. Fold them into everything else. Then gently stir in the soup. Pour into the pan and bake 20 minutes. It should puff up and rise up a lot. If it doesn't, bake it longer. Serve immediately. Note: We suggest dividing the mixture into individual-sized baking dishes instead of baking it in one big pan and slicing it up. Also, we recommend lightly sprinkling the top with salt before baking. Mrs. John Morton, 4468 Salmon St, Philadelphia PA, Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange, October 4 1935, p 12

I've taken to making omelets a lot lately. It's oddly satisfying when it goes right, and you get a good batch of scrambled eggs if the omelet goes awry. Like many people, I only know of one way to make omelets, and it involves the stovetop.

Incidentally, this omelet is made as Fanny Cradock does. She added "little flecks of butter" to the eggs, which are supposed to melt after the eggs begin to set. In theory, this creates "layers of golden cushion." In reality, I couldn't tell the difference when I made another one without the butter inclusions. But if it wasn't for watching Fanny Cradock videos, I wouldn't know how to make eggs do this.

Anyway, I've never heard of baking an omelet before. At first I imagined that one pours the beaten eggs onto a pan and slides it into the oven, much like if one were to bake pancakes instead of making them in a frying pan. But Mrs. John Morton's directions looked a lot more complicated. We decided that a pleasantly chilly evening is a good time to expand my omelet knowledge.

As I was whisking the flour into the yolks, I was thinking "Why isn't this in a double boiler?" It feels like we should be making a stovetop custard, except Mrs. John Morton has us baking it instead. 

The floured egg yolks took on a whimsically bright tone of yellow after we got the flour in. It looks like I could use this mixture to paint a nursery.

Meanwhile, our milk was ready. I think the microwave is seriously underrated for a lot of scorch-prone cooking tasks like scalding milk, and I am very surprised that so few people realize how much easier cooking gets when you're not constantly doing your rubber-spatula best on a saucepan over a low flame. 

We've swung all the way to the opposite of where microwaves started when they entered the home. At first, they were going to replace that outdated "conventional oven," and manufacturers gamely tried to prove that you could ditch the big oven and microwave everything you would have baked. As someone who likes recreationally going to thrift shops (sometimes they're like museums where you're actually allowed to touch everything), I've seen a lot of glossy hardcover microwave cookbooks. All of them are published by microwave manufacturers, all of them claim you can use the microwave to make everything from grilled salmon to a layer cake with custard filling, and all of them are tellingly pristine-looking, with nary an errant splat. Obviously, no amount of mouth-watering color photographs could make the microwave replace the stove.

Later, we collectively realized that while microwaves were honestly rather bad for most cooking, they were absolutely wonderful at reheating leftovers and TV dinners. As those are the most unglamorous things anyone does in the kitchen (even stirring a packet of Kool-Aid gets more respect), the microwave became something that everyone had but you were supposed to be embarrassed about using. I've seen a lot of older houses where the kitchen has an outlet over a closet shelf or in the most hidden corner of the room, so that the microwave could be easily concealed when company came over.

All of this to say, we generally think of microwaves as a means of reheating, but I think they're far better than the stove for things like heating up anything that loves to scorch on the bottom of a pot. Unless you leave milk the microwave for so long that it boils over and goes dry, it simply cannot burn. Also, we only had to make room in the dishwasher for an extra cup, not a saucepan.

Well, I spent longer writing about scalding milk in the microwave than I actually spent scalding it in the microwave-- though not as long as if I'd done it on the stove. At any rate, we slowly poured the milk into the egg yolks, whisking furiously as we went. This is the first time I've tempered egg yolks without someone else slowly pouring in the hot liquid. Like the first time I jump-started a car without someone else to help clip on the cables, it was daunting at first but went perfectly fine. You just have to pour a small splash of hot milk in at a time, and immediately stir as hard as you for a few seconds. After we had all the milk mixed in, we had so much froth that it looked like we might not need to bother beating the egg whites stiff at all. 

I have to note that this recipe goes together very quickly in this millennium, where an electric mixer can be had for the price of two frozen dinners and the milk can be scalded in less time than you need to steep a pot of tea. I'm sure that even if you're using a hand-cranked eggbeater and a saucepan, you could still make one of these pretty quickly (though either way, you have to wash a lot of bowls after).

In Mrs. John Morton's time, this mixer would have cost as much as a car engine.

I thought when we folded the egg whites into the rest of our ingredients, we would have a uniform, well-aerated mixture. Instead, we didn't have enough egg foam to completely mix with everything. The bubbles kept floating to the top. So it looks like this "baked omelet" is more of a multilayered sponge pudding.

In addition to being really cheap even with pandemic prices, you can get this thing put together really quickly if you lay out all your ingredients and bowls at the beginning. Only six minutes after separating the eggs, we were ready to stir in the tomato soup and bake this. 

Speaking of tomato soup, this recipe doesn't use much of it. The original recipe uses only half a can of it. Since we cut it down to a third (two eggs seemed like a much better serving size), that means we're only using a sixth of a can of tomato soup in this. Because I didn't want to waste the rest of it, I discovered that tomato soup is really good drizzled over anything baked with cheddar cheese on top.

As you can see, our tomato omelet isn't tomato-colored at all. It doesn't even contain enough tomato to turn it a slight pink. But never mind those quibbles, it's time to bake!

After 20 minutes, it looked like really puffy bread and smelled rather nice. Who would have guessed you can make something so pretty with eggs, milk, and a can of soup?

When I pulled it out of the oven, the top layer had practically extruded out of the baking dish.

To Mrs. John Morton's credit, this was golden and perfect-looking after baking exactly 20 minutes as specified. But you should know that she wasn't kidding when she wrote to "serve immediately." That big golden puff-cloud barely lasted long enough to snap a photograph. In less than two minutes, it had deflated dramatically. But when we cut into it, we found a custard that had set so perfectly that even the strictest home economics teacher would approve. It was almost but not quite like a gelatin. I haven't made a baked custard that came out so perfectly in a long time.

I did not expect the tomato to separate out into a pink layer on the bottom, but it's very pretty to look at.

As for the taste, this is basically a plain quiche in fancy clothes. I thought it needed a lot more tomato. It tasted like perfectly nice scrambled eggs. I liked it, but I also felt misled. Mrs. John Morton and the Philadelphia Inquirer Recipe Exchange promised me tomatoes, and instead we got barely a hint of them. But with that said, this was pretty good. And because I always like an excuse to wield an electric mixer, I've made this a few times when the oven was already heated up for something else. 

I will end with a quick note on baking times. If the foam hasn't made a dramatic rise, the custard is still nothing but a hot runny mess. I took this out of the oven at 20 minutes precisely, even though the top was puffy but not yet a massive airy cloud. The custard underneath was as watery as when I put it in the oven.

But if you find your baked omelet isn't firmed up yet, you can just pop it back into the oven and it'll be fine. Wait until it almost looks like the puffy top layer has practically extruded from the pan, and your omelet will be perfect.