Home › Vegetables › To Bake Egg Plant
To Bake Egg Plant
The egg plant should be well parboiled; remove the meat carefully, and mix it with butter, pepper, salt and bread crumbs; then put this mixture into the hulls; place in an oven and bake.
A stuffed eggplant with almost no numbers in it. The gaps worth filling are the oven temperature, the parboiling time, and the ratio of crumbs to flesh.
- Quantities to work fromOne medium eggplant (about 1 lb) yields enough flesh for two halves. Figure roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 1/2 to 3/4 cup fresh breadcrumbs, and salt and pepper to taste per eggplant; add crumbs gradually until the mixture holds together but is not dry.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives none. A moderate oven, 350F, is right for reheating an already-cooked filling and browning the top: 20 to 30 minutes.
- Parboiling, and the hinge"Well parboiled" means halved and simmered until a knife slides through the flesh without resistance, about 10 to 15 minutes. Undercook it and the scooped flesh stays spongy; the filling is only warmed through in the oven, so all the real cooking happens here.
- Leave a wall"Remove the meat carefully" is the practical instruction. Leave about 1/4 inch of flesh attached to the skin or the shell collapses in the oven and the filling runs out.
- DrainingParboiled eggplant holds a great deal of water. Press the halves cut side down on a towel and squeeze the scooped flesh before mixing, or the crumbs turn to paste.
- Salting is optional nowMany period cookbooks called for salting and pressing eggplant to draw out bitterness. Modern cultivars are generally milder, and the parboiling here does much of the work, so it can usually be skipped.
- Breadcrumbs of the periodThese would have been dried or grated stale bread from the household loaf, coarser and drier than commercial crumbs.
- ServingTwo halves serve two as a side dish. A dusting of extra crumbs and dabs of butter on top before baking gives a browned crust, though the recipe does not call for it.
Eggplant reached American kitchens slowly. It was grown in the South and in market gardens near the big Eastern cities through the nineteenth century but was long treated with suspicion elsewhere, sometimes as ornamental rather than food. Two standard treatments became usual: sliced, breaded and fried, or parboiled, stuffed and baked as here. The name is usually traced to early European varieties that were small, white and egg-shaped. The terseness is characteristic of the genre: such books were written for cooks who already knew how hot an oven to use and would not have expected to be told.