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Fried Egg Plant
Peel good-sized egg plant; cut into slices of 1/4 inch. Dust with salt and pepper; dip in beaten egg; roll in fine bread-crumbs and saute in hot Crisco. When they are brown on 1 side, turn and brown on the other. If preferred, the egg plant may be dipped in thin batter instead of egg and crumbs, and fried.
A straightforward breaded saute that still works exactly as written, with two adjustments: modern eggplant is less bitter than the 1915 crop, and Crisco is not the only fat available.
- CriscoThe book was published as promotional literature for Crisco, so the shortening appears in nearly every recipe. Any neutral fat with a decent smoke point does the same job; use about 1/4 inch in the pan, and add more between batches since the coating drinks it up.
- Salting the slices"Dust with salt and pepper" is done immediately before breading here, but if your eggplant is large or seedy, salt the slices and let them drain 30 minutes, then blot dry. It firms the flesh so it absorbs less fat. Small, glossy, young eggplant needs no such treatment.
- Slice thicknessA quarter inch is deliberate and worth keeping. Thicker rounds stay spongy in the middle by the time the crumbs are brown; thinner ones collapse into the coating.
- Fat temperature"Hot" is not defined in the book; in practice you want the fat shimmering but not smoking, around 350-365F if you care to measure. Too cool and the crumbs soak rather than seal; too hot and they darken before the eggplant softens. Two to three minutes a side is usually enough.
- Breading orderFlour the salted slices lightly before the egg wash, even though the original skips it. Eggplant sheds moisture at the cut surface and the egg slides off bare flesh.
- The batter variantThe recipe gives no formula for its "thin batter"; a period batter of this kind would typically have been flour with egg and milk, thinned to about the consistency of heavy cream. It tends to fry softer than crumbs and wants slightly hotter fat to set on contact.
- YieldA good-sized eggplant sliced at a quarter inch gives upwards of twenty rounds, enough for four as a side dish. Drain on paper and salt again while hot; serve at once, since the coating softens within minutes.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook written to sell a specific product: Procter & Gamble launched Crisco in 1911, and the recipe collections issued under its name were designed to teach American cooks to substitute hydrogenated vegetable shortening for lard and butter in everything, frying included. Eggplant itself was still a somewhat unfamiliar vegetable in the English-speaking kitchen of the period, grown in the South and in immigrant households, and often described in general cookbooks with an air of introduction. Breading and frying was a common treatment offered to cautious readers, since it made the vegetable taste more or less like a cutlet. The plant takes its name from the small white, egg-shaped varieties common in nineteenth-century seed catalogues.