Parboil the egg-plant and cut in half. Scrape out some of the inside and chop some cooked lamb, 2 green peppers, 1 onion, and 2 tomatoes. Then mix with a beaten egg, 1 tablespoonful of butter, salt and pepper to taste. Fill the halves with the mixture; sprinkle with bread-crumbs and bits of butter. Put in a baking-dish with a little stock and bake.
A terse calendar-page recipe that assumes you already know how stuffed vegetables behave. The quantities are given for one medium eggplant and a cup or so of leftover roast lamb; scale from there.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given; the recipe assumes a cook who judges her own oven. Bake at 375F for 30-40 minutes, until the shells give easily to a knife and the crumbs have browned.
- Parboil, but brieflyFive to seven minutes in salted water is enough — the shell should bend without collapsing. An eggplant boiled soft will slump the moment it is filled and the stuffing will leak into the stock.
- Salt the shellsThe original skips this. Salting the hollowed halves for 20 minutes and blotting them dry draws out water that would otherwise dilute the filling, and improves the texture of older, seedier fruit.
- Cook the filling firstThe lamb is already cooked, but the onion, peppers and scraped-out flesh are not. Sweat them in the butter until soft and most of the tomato liquid has gone, then cool slightly before adding the beaten egg, which is there to bind rather than to scramble.
- Green peppersIn an American cookbook of this period this means a plain unripe bell pepper, not a chile. Two large ones will overwhelm a single eggplant; one is usually right.
- "A little stock"A quarter inch or so in the dish, depending on its size — perhaps half a cup. It steams the shells from below and keeps them from scorching; it is not a sauce and should not cover them.
- YieldTwo halves serve two as a main course with bread, or four as part of a larger meal.
Stuffed vegetables of this kind are the backbone of Ottoman-era cooking across Greece, Turkey and the Levant, where the family of dishes is known by variations on the word for "stuffed" — gemista in Greek, dolma in Turkish. What this page really documents, though, is an American cookbook of the period reaching for national labels: a dish a day, each tagged with a country, in a decade when eggplant was still an unfamiliar vegetable in much of the United States and Greek and Near Eastern immigration was making its cooking newly visible in eastern cities. The instruction to use "some cooked lamb" is the giveaway that this was pitched at a household with Sunday leftovers rather than at anyone cooking in the Greek tradition.