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Eggplant en Casserole
4 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 1 large eggplant 3 small onions 2 garlic cloves 3 tomatoes 1 green pepper Salt and pepper to taste Slice eggplant into thin slices, then slice onions, garlic, tomatoes and pepper quite thin. Arrange them, alternately, in a Criscoed casserole, seasoning each layer with salt and pepper. Pour in melted Crisco and cover. Cook over slow fire or in moderate oven till the eggplant is tender. Serve hot or cold.
A layered vegetable dish that anticipates ratatouille, written for a covered pot on the stove or in the oven. Two things decide whether it works: keeping it covered so the vegetables steam in their own juice, and cooking it long enough that the eggplant collapses rather than merely softens.
- What "casserole" means hereAt this date the word still usually meant the vessel — a lidded earthenware or enamelled pot that could go on the range or into the oven — though it was already starting to name the dish cooked in it. Any heavy Dutch oven or lidded braiser works. "Criscoed" simply means greased.
- CriscoThis book was published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, then a new product, which is why shortening appears where an older cook would have used butter or olive oil. Four tablespoons of any neutral oil, or olive oil, does the same job and tastes better with these vegetables.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is usually taken as about 350-375F. "Slow fire" on the stovetop means the lowest steady simmer you can hold under a heavy lid.
- TimingNo time is given. Expect 45 to 60 minutes covered at 350F for a large eggplant sliced thin, longer on the stovetop. The eggplant should be soft enough to cut with the side of a spoon.
- Salting the eggplantThe recipe seasons each layer as it builds, which is fine, but salting the sliced eggplant separately for 20 minutes and blotting it dry first draws out water and keeps the finished dish from going soupy. Reduce the salt in the layers accordingly.
- Two cloves of garlic, slicedSliced thin and layered rather than minced, the garlic goes sweet and mild over an hour. This is not a heavily garlicked dish despite the quantity.
- Uncovering at the endTomatoes and eggplant throw off a good deal of liquid. If the pot is swimming when the eggplant is tender, take the lid off for the last 10 to 15 minutes in the oven.
- Yield and servingOne large eggplant with its companions serves four as a side, two or three as a main. "Serve hot or cold" is meant seriously — cold, after a night in the refrigerator, the flavors settle and it eats like a relish or salad.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to introduce cooks to Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company launched in 1911. That commercial purpose helps explain why melted shortening turns up in a Mediterranean vegetable braise where olive oil would be the obvious choice. The dish itself belongs to a family of slow-cooked eggplant-tomato-pepper preparations found around the Mediterranean and, in the United States, most strongly in Louisiana and the Gulf South, where eggplant was a well-established garden crop. Its appearance in a mainstream American promotional cookbook is a small marker of how far eggplant had traveled by the 1910s.