Skip to main content
Main

Friars Omelet

A baked apple omelet with butter, sugar, spices, eggs, bread crumbs, served warm with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Friars Omelet

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the apple base

  1. Stew the apples as for sauce.

  2. While hot, add the butter.

  3. Once cold, mix in the sugar, beaten eggs, nutmeg, and cinnamon.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish.

  2. Cover the top with bread crumbs.

  3. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

  4. Serve warm with cream.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Nutmeg + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the bulk and soft, moist body of the dish once stewed.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that gives the apple base a smooth, tender texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the tartness of the apples.
Eggs
Bind the mixture and help it set into a custard-like texture when baked.

The step that matters

Let the apples cool before adding the eggs. Eggs added to very hot apples can scramble unevenly rather than blending smoothly. Cooling first lets the eggs mix in evenly and set gently in the oven.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, sugar, egg, nutmeg, cinnamon, bread, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, sugar, egg, nutmeg, cinnamon, bread, cream. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes