Skip to main content
Dessert

Friar's Omelet

A sweet apple omelet baked with butter, sugar, eggs, cream, bread crumbs, and currants.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Friar's 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.

Prepare the apple base

  1. Boil the apples until soft, then mash them for sauce.

  2. Stir in the butter and white sugar until well combined and let it cool.

Make the omelet

  1. Once cooled, add the eggs and cream, mixing well.

  2. Butter a baking dish and coat the bottom and sides with bread crumbs.

  3. Pour the mixture into the prepared dish and sprinkle currants on top.

  4. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 45 minutes.

Serve

  1. Turn the omelet onto a platter and sift sugar over it.

  2. Serve with sugar and cream or boiled custard for a nicer option.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Apple + curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,918 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Cook down into a soft mash that forms the moist, sweet body of the omelet.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving the mixture a tender, smooth texture.
Eggs
Set during baking to bind the mixture into a firm, sliceable omelet.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, keeping the custard-like mixture tender as it bakes.
White sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the apple mixture taste balanced and rounded.

The step that matters

Let the apple mixture cool before adding the eggs. Hot apple mixture can begin to cook the eggs unevenly or curdle them, so cooling first keeps the eggs smooth and lets them blend evenly for a uniform set in the oven.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, butter, sugar, egg, cream, bread. 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

Apple Bread PuddingApple Bread Pudding21 recipesApple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesBread PuddingBread Pudding153 recipesSoft Ginger BreadSoft Ginger Bread85 recipes