Age-old recipes at times require sleuthing
Sifting through and trying out old family recipes sent in by readers for our Recipe Box project has been a joy. But it’s also brought challenges, especially in the testing.
Directions are often sketchy, details get lost in generations of translation (no surprise there), and in many cases, the living descendants have not themselves prepared the recipe — they only remember enjoying it at Grandma’s house, or hearing fond childhood remembrances from their mother, who herself never made it.
Which doesn’t make the recipe any less a treasured piece of the family heritage.
This week’s recipe is a good example. I stayed home one morning last week to test and shoot it, thinking it would be a quick dish to whip up. I told my colleagues I’d be at work an hour late.
Two hours late, I arrived at my desk with a heavily marked-up recipe.
The recipe, for Raisin Omelet Deluxe, was submitted by Nelma Stertz of New Berlin. She wrote that she didn’t know how old the recipe was, but that her Great-Grandma Buchholtz was born in 1871 and it was handed down from her grandmother. “It is an old German recipe, called ‘Eirepan,’” Stertz wrote. “Literally, ‘egg-pan’ or pan of eggs. It is a bit unusual with the raisins, and I must admit I never liked it, but it is traditional.”
It is served, according to Stertz, as a dessert.
What it is, in fact, is a torte of sorts, with three layers of what I would describe as very thick crepes, with a cooked raisin filling between the layers and sugar sprinkled on top.
Instructions begin with cooking the raisin filling. Right away, I was suspect. Half a cup of raisins to 2 cups water and a tablespoon of cornstarch? After about 5 minutes of simmering, I added another 1⁄2 cup of raisins, thinking the original amount couldn’t possibly be enough.
Well. I hadn’t accounted for the plumping of the raisins that occurred while the filling sat and cooled. Turns out, that 1⁄2 cup was just about right.
As for the egg part of the recipe — good thing there were three layers, because it took me that many tries to get it right.
The first layer, I tried to cook as you do an omelet, lifting up the edge to get the uncooked portion slip underneath. Bad idea. At the same time, fearful of overcooking
it, I tried to flip out the delicate egg cake too soon. You can’t see it in the photo, but the bottom layer was a patched-together mess.
The second layer I cooked undisturbed, cooked it longer and cooked it covered. That worked better, but it still wasn’t perfect.
Finally, I added a bit of butter to the pan first (even though it was a nonstick pan), and cooked it even longer. This one flipped out nearly perfectly.
Aside from technique, there was the matter of the recipe’s pedigree.
“Eirepan,” first off, is misspelled — perfectly understandable when you're generations removed from the old country. “Pan of eggs” in German is really “eierpfanne.” But I couldn’t find a dish online by that name, or a German recipe exactly like this one.
However, the egg-andraisin combination turns up in a popular Bavarian and Austrian dish called “kaiserschmarrn” (also known as Austrian pancakes). A batter of eggs, milk and flour is cooked similarly to the recipe I made, but then cut up into pieces (“schmarren” means “slashed”) and browned in the same pan.
Versions vary, but typically the eggs are separated, with the whites beaten and folded into the batter. The batter is sweetened with sugar — something I think would improve Stertz’s raisin omelet.
Also, the raisins, when used, are soaked first in rum and added to the batter in the pan, rather than made into a separate sauce.
For serving, the raisinstudded, browned egg pieces are piled onto a plate and sprinkled with powdered sugar, and then served with applesauce or preserves, plum sauce or stewed fruits.
If Nelma Stertz’s family recipe is related to kaiserschmarrn, the timing is spot on. The dish dates back to the 1800s. As for the “kaiser” part of the name, legend has it that Austrian Kaiser Franz Joseph (1830-1916) was first served the dish, possibly on one of his hunting expeditions, and that it was named in his honor.