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Egg Plant, Fried
Peel one medium-sized egg plant, cut it into six round slices about half an inch in thickness, and season with half a tea-spoonful of pepper. Dip the pieces in beaten egg and fresh bread-crumbs, and fry them in hot fat for five minutes. Remove, salt slightly again, and drain them well. Serve on a hot dish over a folded napkin. (See also AUBERGINES.)
A plain deep-fried cutlet of aubergine, written for cooks who kept a pan of frying fat standing by. Two things need attention: the moisture in the slices and the temperature of the fat.
- Salt the slices firstThe recipe gives salt only after frying. Half an hour of salting on a rack is commonly said to help the slices take up less fat; modern cultivars are in any case rarely bitter. Pat them dry before breading.
- Fat temperatureThe book gives no temperature; "hot fat" for a fry of this kind is usually taken today as somewhere around 350-375F. Below that the crumb coat soaks through; above it the outside colours before the inside turns creamy. Half-inch slices may need less than the five minutes given if shallow-fried rather than submerged, turned once.
- Make the coating stickEgg slips off damp aubergine. Dust each slice lightly with seasoned flour before the egg and crumbs, and let the breaded slices sit five minutes so the coating sets.
- That half tea-spoonful of pepperIt is for six slices and is a generous amount by current taste. Season the flour or the crumbs rather than the bare vegetable, where it mostly falls off in the fat.
- Fresh bread-crumbsMeans crumbs torn or grated from a day-old loaf, not dried commercial crumb. They colour differently in the pan from dry crumbs, so watch the colour rather than the clock.
- The folded napkinA Victorian grease blotter and a way of keeping fried food from sitting in its own steam. Drain on a wire rack or paper towels, then transfer to the hot dish; the napkin is optional theatre.
- YieldSix slices from one medium aubergine: a side dish for two or three. Serve immediately, as breaded aubergine goes limp within minutes.
The cross-reference to "aubergines" suggests the fuller treatment sits under the French name, with "egg plant" given its own short entry. The name comes from early European cultivars that were small, white and genuinely egg-shaped rather than the large purple fruit now standard. Aubergines reached the Mediterranean through Arab agriculture and were long treated with suspicion in northern Europe, partly for their nightshade kinship; by the late nineteenth century they appear in English cookery books mostly fried, stuffed or stewed with tomato. Egg-and-crumbing is the same treatment these books give veal cutlets and cold croquettes, which is how an unfamiliar vegetable was made legible to a British household.