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Dessert

Friar's Omelet

A baked apple omelet with butter, sugar, eggs, cream, and currants, served with sugar and boiled custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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 filling

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

  2. Stir in the butter and sugar until well combined.

  3. Let the mixture cool, then add the beaten eggs and cream.

Bake and serve

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

  2. Pour the apple mixture into the dish and sprinkle currants on top.

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

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

  5. Serve with sugar and cream or boiled custard.

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
Cooked and mashed into sauce, they form the moist, sweet bulk of the omelet.
Eggs
Beaten eggs set during baking, binding the apple mixture into a firm, sliceable omelet.
Butter
Adds richness and a tender texture to the apple sauce.
White sugar
Sweetens the apple sauce and helps the surface brown during baking.
Cream
Adds moisture and richness, giving the custard-like interior a softer texture.

The step that matters

Let the mixture cool before adding the eggs. Hot apple sauce can begin to scramble beaten eggs before baking, causing a grainy texture and uneven setting in the finished omelet.

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.

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