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An Excellent Omelette

A fluffy omelette made with flour, baking powder, eggs, milk, butter, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

An Excellent Omelette

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the batter

  1. Mix flour and baking powder in a dry bowl.

  2. Beat eggs separately until very light.

  3. Slowly add salt and milk to the flour mixture.

  4. Fold in the yolks.

  5. Fold in the whites.

Cook and serve

  1. Heat a saucepan and melt the butter until browned.

  2. Pour the batter into the saucepan, cover, and cook on low heat until a straw comes out clean.

  3. Fold the omelette in half and serve.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Provides the starch structure that holds the batter together as it cooks.
Baking powder
Releases gas during cooking so the omelette rises and becomes light.
Eggs
Set when heated to give the omelette its structure, and whipped air adds lightness.
Rich sweet milk
Adds moisture and softness, and keeps the batter tender after cooking.
Butter
Adds fat and browned flavour to the surface of the omelette.

The step that matters

Fold in the whites. Whites hold whipped air that gives lightness, so folding gently with a spatula keeps that air in. Stirring or beating them down makes the omelette dense.

“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.

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