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Aubergines Au Gratin
Put four aubergines into a pan of hot water, and boil for ten minutes. Then take them out of the water and let them get cold. Next cut each in half and take out the seeds. Brush each half over with some warmed butter and arrange them neatly in a fire-proof dish and put a layer of grated cheese on each half. Put the dish in a quick oven and bake till the aubergines are soft, probably about ten minutes. Pour over them some good brown sauce and serve in the dish in which they were cooked. Cost, 1s. for eight portions.
A straightforward gratin, though the timings assume smaller, seedier aubergines than the ones sold today.
- "Quick oven"Read this as somewhere around 400-425F, the usual modern reading of the term. At that heat the cheese browns fast, so watch the top rather than the clock.
- Ten minutes will not be enoughTen minutes may not be enough -- modern aubergines are large and dense. After the initial boil, halved fruit will often want a good deal longer in the oven than the ten minutes given; test with a knife tip at the thickest point, not by colour, and cover or lower the heat if the cheese colours before the flesh softens.
- Taking out the seedsOlder varieties had coarse, bitter seeds worth scooping out. Today's cultivars are bred against bitterness, and the seedy centre is edible, so you can skip this or simply score the flesh in a diamond pattern to help the butter penetrate.
- Salting instead of boilingThe recipe does not say why it boils the aubergines first, though bitterness may be part of it. Halving them, salting the cut faces for 20 minutes and blotting them dry gives a firmer result than waterlogging them, and improves browning.
- The cheeseUnspecified, but a hard grating cheese is meant — Parmesan, or a dry Cheddar. Soft cheeses release water and slump into the flesh instead of forming a crust.
- Good brown sauceA roux-thickened brown sauce or meat gravy of the period, made in advance. A well-reduced beef or veal stock thickened lightly stands in. The recipe pours it over before serving; if you want the gratin surface to stay crisp, bring it to the table separately instead.
- Yield and costFour aubergines, halved, give the stated eight portions as a side dish or light course. The shilling is a late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century price, depending on the edition, and is not directly convertible.
Cassell's places this among its French-influenced vegetable dishes, and the name shows it: aubergine came into English from French, itself borrowed via Catalan and Arabic from a Sanskrit root, while British and American cooks more often said egg-plant, after the small white ovoid varieties then common. The vegetable reached Europe through Arab agriculture in the medieval Mediterranean and was long treated with suspicion in the north — a nightshade, and reputed bitter — which may be part of why so many nineteenth-century recipes begin by boiling or salting it. Serving a vegetable au gratin under grated cheese and a brown sauce is characteristic of late-Victorian English adaptation of restaurant cookery: the aubergine is the exotic element, but the treatment is entirely the standard repertoire of the professional kitchen, and the note that the dish is served in the vessel it was cooked in may owe something to the then-recent popularity of fireproof earthenware for the table.