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Aubergines with Poached Eggs
Cut three aubergines in halves lengthways, and remove the pips. Cook them till tender in salted water, take up and drain on a sieve. Mix one gill of tomato pulp with one ounce of bread-crumbs and two ounces of chopped ham, warm up with half an ounce of butter, and reduce a little. Season with pepper and salt, and fill the cavities of the aubergines with this. Put the aubergines on a dish, sprinkle with chopped parsley, and place in a hot oven for five minutes. Place one poached egg carefully on each half, garnish with parsley, and serve hot. Probable cost, 1s. 9d.
A straightforward late-Victorian supper dish that survives translation well, provided the aubergine halves are drained hard before they are filled.
- Drain, then drain againBoiled aubergine holds a great deal of water, and a waterlogged shell will flood the filling and slide the egg off. After the sieve, press the halves gently between clean cloths and blot the cavities dry.
- A gillFive fluid ounces in British measure, so half a cup plus a tablespoon. Modern half-cup passata or thick crushed tomato is the closest match to "tomato pulp".
- "Remove the pips"Older varieties are generally reckoned to have been more bitter than today's glossy fruit, which is the likely reason for the instruction. With modern aubergines you can simply scoop a shallow trench to make room for the stuffing and leave the seeds alone.
- Hot ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 425-450F, though the book gives no temperatures. The five minutes is only to heat the filling through and set the surface; the aubergine is already cooked and will collapse if left longer.
- HamCooked ham, chopped fine, not raw gammon. Two ounces is about a third of a cup once chopped, and it is doing all the salting, so taste before adding more.
- Order of workPoach the eggs while the filled halves are in the oven, and have the dish out and waiting. A poached egg set on hot aubergine will keep going; one left standing in water goes hard.
- YieldSix halves, six eggs. Three as a light main course with bread, six as a first course.
The treatment here is frankly French: the vegetable hollowed, stuffed with a tomato-and-ham farce and finished with an egg is a dish of the same family as the many aubergines farcies of Continental practice, filtered through an English kitchen that added breadcrumbs to bind and parsley to garnish almost everything. The poached egg on top suggests a luncheon or supper dish in the period's scheme of meals, where eggs did the work that a piece of meat would do at dinner.