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Stuffed Egg Plant
Cut a slice from the stem end of a large egg plant. Remove the inside, leaving a shell one-eighth inch thick. Cut pulp in onehalf inch cubes, and cook in boiling salted water until tender; drain. Cook two tablespoons butter with one onion finely chopped, until delicately colored (not brown), add one tablespoon finely chopped parsley. Mix with egg plant, season with salt and pepper, and refill shell. Cover with one-half cup buttered crumbs and bake in the oven until heated throughout and crumbs are brown. Serve in shell.
A simple stuffed vegetable from a Sunday-dinner book that assumed a coal range and a cook with time. Two details carry the dish: the shell must be thick enough to hold together, and the bread crumbs must be genuinely buttered, not dry.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given because the book assumes a range oven judged by hand. Bake at 375F for 20-25 minutes, until the filling is hot through and the crumbs are evenly browned.
- An eighth-inch shell is thinThinner than many cooks will manage without tearing. A quarter inch holds its shape better and still leaves plenty of pulp for the filling. Scoop with a sturdy spoon rather than a knife.
- Salting the pulpOlder eggplant varieties are often said to have been more bitter than modern ones, though the recipe itself gives no reason for boiling and draining the pulp. Boiling tends to give a watery, bland result; salting the cubes for 20 minutes, then squeezing and sauteeing them in the onion butter, gives more flavour.
- Buttered crumbsThis means fresh soft bread crumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly two tablespoons of butter to a half cup of crumbs. Dry commercial crumbs will scorch before the filling heats.
- "Delicately colored (not brown)"The onion should go soft and translucent with a faint gold edge only. Browned onion dominates a dish this plain.
- Standing the shell upA slice cut from the stem end leaves a shell that wobbles. Set it in a small baking dish or on a ring of crumpled foil so it does not tip and spill while baking.
- YieldOne large eggplant serves two as a main course or four as a side.
Stuffed eggplant belongs to a family of hollowed-and-refilled vegetable dishes that ran through nineteenth-century American cookery alongside stuffed peppers, tomatoes and onions. Eggplant was still comparatively unfamiliar in northern American kitchens at the turn of the century, and better known in the South and in Creole cooking, where stuffed eggplant with shrimp or ham appears in period cookbooks; the version here uses only onion, parsley and crumbs. The instruction to serve in the shell matters as much as the filling, since the presentation is part of what the dish offers.