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Stuffed Eggplant
3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 3 small eggplants 1/2 cupful breadcrumbs 1 1/2 cupfuls stock 1/2 cupful chopped cooked chicken or veal 1 egg Salt, pepper, and nutmeg to taste 1/2 cupful white wine Criscoed crumbs 1 tablespoonful flour 1 tablespoonful sherry Cut eggplants in halves and scoop out inside, leaving shell half inch thick. Soak 1/2 cupful breadcrumbs in 1/2 cupful stock ten minutes, then add cooked chicken, 2 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco, egg, well beaten, and seasoning of salt, pepper and nutmeg. Divide this forcemeat into eggplants, sprinkle Criscoed crumbs on top, set them in greased pan, pour in rest of stock and white wine and bake half hour in moderate oven. Serve on hot dish with following sauce.
Put 1 tablespoonful Crisco and 1 tablespoonful flour into saucepan and blend over fire, add sherry and 1 cupful liquor from pan in which they were baked, and cook five minutes.
Sufficient for three eggplants.
Stuffed Potatoes (Kate B. Vaughn) 2 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 6 large potatoes 2 tablespoonfuls grated cheese 1 yolk of egg Salt and pepper to taste Wash six well shaped white potatoes and rub skin with Crisco. Bake until tender, cut slice of one end, and with a teaspoon remove all potato from shells. Mash the potato, adding Crisco, cheese, seasonings, and egg yolk. Refill shells and bake fifteen minutes. Serve hot on napkin. Sufficient for six potatoes.
Two recipes run together here, both built around Crisco, which the book exists partly to promote. The eggplant is the more demanding of the two and needs a little help with timing.
- CriscoAny neutral solid or liquid fat works: butter, vegetable shortening, or olive oil. "Criscoed crumbs" means breadcrumbs tossed with melted fat until lightly coated, the equivalent of buttered crumbs.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a moderate oven is usually taken as somewhere around 350F. The half hour given is optimistic for raw eggplant shells; check with a knife tip at the thickest part of the shell and give it 40-50 minutes if needed.
- Salt the shells firstThe recipe skips this. Salting the scooped shells and draining them 20-30 minutes draws out water, which keeps the filling from going soupy and the shells from collapsing.
- Use the scooped fleshNothing is said about the inside you remove. Chop and sauté it and fold it into the forcemeat, or the dish wastes most of the vegetable.
- Stock split two waysHalf a cup soaks the crumbs; the remaining cup goes into the pan with the wine and becomes the base of the sauce. Add water to the pan if it threatens to dry out before the eggplant is done.
- The sauceBlend fat and flour over heat for a minute or two before adding liquid, and strain the pan liquor. A cupful is only likely if the pan has not run dry, so watch it during baking.
- NutmegNot a garnish here. A restrained grating is what carries the veal or chicken forcemeat; nutmeg was a long-standing seasoning for meat forcemeats in both English and French cookery.
- YieldThe book says the filling is sufficient for three eggplants and for six potatoes. Three eggplants halved gives six halves, which would serve six as a side or three as a light main.
- "Serve hot on napkin"A folded linen napkin on the platter, standard period practice for baked potatoes; it absorbs steam and keeps them from sliding. A cloth-lined dish does the same thing.
A Calendar of Dinners was published by Procter & Gamble to sell Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced in 1911, and the recipes in it call for the product throughout -- a form of advertising cookbook that flourished in the early twentieth century, when a new manufactured fat needed a whole cuisine written around it to displace lard and butter. Kate B. Vaughn, credited on the stuffed potatoes, was a domestic-science writer of the period. Stuffed eggplant with a bread-and-meat forcemeat, seasoned with nutmeg and finished with a sherry-thickened pan sauce, was already appearing in American cookbooks in the nineteenth century, so the treatment here is considerably older than the shortening it is written around.