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Egg-Plant Sauté (with Fine Herbs
Pare a medium-sized egg-plant, cut in very thin slices, sprimkie with salt and pile in a colander. Cover with a plate and weights to press out the acrid juice; let stand two hours, sprinkle with pepper, dredge with flour, and sauté in hot butter until crisp and a golden brown. Mix together one-half teaspoon each finely chopped parsley and chives, one-fourth teaspoon very finely chopped chervil and sprinkle lightly over egg-plant as soon as crisp. Arrange on hot serving dish and serve at once.
A simple sauté that lives or dies on two things: how thin the slices are and how hot the butter is. The two-hour salting is the part most modern cooks skip, and here it matters more than usual.
- Salting and pressingTwo hours under a plate and weights draws out water as much as bitterness, and it is what lets the slices crisp rather than steam. An hour will do if you are pressed, but rinse the salt off and blot the slices very dry before flouring or they will be inedibly salty and will not brown.
- Modern eggplant is not bitterThe "acrid juice" the book is fighting has largely been bred out of today's globe eggplants. Salt anyway, for the texture, not the taste.
- Slice thickness"very thin" here probably means something on the order of 1/8 inch. Thicker slices need more time in the pan than the flour coating will survive, and you get a pale, greasy result.
- Butter alone will burnEggplant drinks fat and these slices need real heat. Use clarified butter, or half butter and half a neutral oil, over medium-high heat, and add more fat between batches — the pan will run dry fast.
- DredgingFlour the slices only as each batch goes into the pan. Floured eggplant left sitting turns pasty as the surface moisture comes back.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh; it has a faint anise note that neither parsley nor tarragon quite replaces. If you cannot find it, use a little more parsley and chives rather than substituting tarragon, which will dominate the dish.
- Herbs go on off the heatThe quantities are small on purpose — this is a light dusting, not a herb crust. Chives and chervil both lose their flavor in hot fat, so sprinkle after the slices leave the pan.
- YieldOne medium eggplant sliced this thin will probably serve three or four as a side; the recipe gives no figure. Fry in single-layer batches and hold them on a rack in a low oven; piling them up softens the crust immediately.
52 Sunday Dinners belongs to a wave of early twentieth-century American menu books that organized cooking by the week rather than by the dish, and this one puts a French-styled vegetable course into an ordinary Sunday dinner. The "fine herbs" of the title is fines herbes, the classic French mixture of parsley, chives, chervil and tarragon, here trimmed to three. Long salting under weights was common advice for eggplant in this period, when older varieties were more bitter and watery than today's, and the vegetable was still often treated as something that came into Anglo-American kitchens by way of French and Mediterranean cooking rather than as a staple.