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Fried Egg Plant
Pare a medium-sized egg plant, cut in one-fourth inch slices and soak in cold salt water over night. Drain and cover with cold water one hour, drain again and dry between towels. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip in batter and fry in deep, hot Cottolene. 1 cup bread flour. ½ teaspoon salt.
A straightforward deep-fry, but the ingredient list is a fragment and the pre-treatment belongs to an older kind of eggplant. A few things to settle before you start.
- The batter is incompleteOnly 1 cup bread flour and 1½ teaspoons salt are given; the liquid and egg are missing, presumably supplied by a general batter formula elsewhere in the book. A period fritter batter of 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, 1 egg and about ¾ cup milk or water, beaten smooth, is a reasonable reconstruction for this quantity of flour.
- CottoleneA branded shortening sold by the N. K. Fairbank Company, made from cottonseed oil combined with beef suet, and the product this book was written to promote. Any neutral high-smoke-point oil stands in.
- Frying temperatureThe book only says "deep, hot"; modern deep-frying practice puts that at roughly 365-375°F. Below that the batter absorbs fat and the eggplant steams; above it the coating colors before the flesh softens. Fry in batches so the oil does not drop.
- The overnight soakSalt water overnight, then an hour in fresh water, was aimed at the bitterness and abundant seeds of early twentieth-century eggplant. Modern cultivars are bred against that bitterness; 30 to 45 minutes salted on a rack, then patted dry, does everything this step was meant to do.
- Drying matters more than soakingThis is the hinge. Wet slices will not hold batter and will spit violently in the fat. Press them genuinely dry between towels before seasoning.
- Slice thicknessA quarter inch is thick enough to stay creamy inside and thin enough to cook through in the few minutes the batter needs to brown. Cut much thicker and the coating may be done before the flesh is.
- YieldA medium eggplant gives a couple of dozen quarter-inch slices, enough for about four as a side dish. Serve at once; battered eggplant goes limp quickly out of the fat.
52 Sunday Dinners (1913) was published by the N. K. Fairbank Company to promote Cottolene, a shortening of cottonseed oil blended with beef suet, marketed as a cheaper, lighter substitute for lard — hence its appearance in the frying instruction of nearly every recipe in the book. Eggplant reached American tables slowly; through much of the nineteenth century it was grown as an ornamental as often as a vegetable, and cookbooks that did include it leaned heavily on frying, which suits its spongy flesh better than boiling. The long soak in salt water reflects a period conviction that eggplant was bitter — it belongs to the nightshade family, and that association lingered in print long after the plant was accepted in the kitchen garden.