Ethel Levey
EGG PLANT-STUFFED
Boil egg plant whole about twenty minutes. Then cut in half, lengthwise, and remove the interior leaving only the shell of the vegetable. Put interior into a bowl with two hard-boiled eggs (chopped fine), a little chopped onion and chopped green pepper and some bread crumbs. Salt and pepper to taste.
Mix thoroughly and fill the empty halves of the egg plant and place a lump of butter on top of each. Put in a moderate oven and bake for twenty minutes.
A straightforward stuffed eggplant; the only vagueness is quantity and oven heat, both easily pinned down.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" in this period is usually taken as somewhere around 350-375F. Twenty minutes is enough to heat the filling through and brown the butter-glazed tops, since the pulp and eggs are already cooked, though the onion and pepper go in raw and will stay on the firm side.
- Size and yieldOne large globe eggplant (about 1 1/2 lb) makes two filled halves, enough for two as a main or four as a side. The two hard-boiled eggs suit that size; scale up if you use two smaller eggplants.
- The hinge: drain the pulpBoiled eggplant holds a great deal of water. Squeeze or press the scooped flesh, or let it sit in a colander a few minutes before mixing, or the filling will be soupy and the bread crumbs will collapse.
- Boiling wholeTwenty minutes at a simmer softens a medium eggplant; a very large one may want twenty-five. Keep it submerged with a plate, as it floats. Modern practice more often halves and roasts the eggplant first, which drives off water instead of adding it, but the boiled version is what this recipe intends.
- Bread crumbsThe recipe says only "some bread crumbs"; in this period that most likely means dry crumbs rather than the soft fresh kind sold in tubs today, and certainly not seasoned Italian-style crumbs. Start with about half a cup and add more only if the mixture will not hold together.
- Leave a real shellScoop to about a quarter inch of the skin. Any thinner and the halves slump in the oven; the boiled skin has no structure left to spare.
- SeasoningThe original relies entirely on salt, pepper, onion and green pepper. A little grated cheese or a handful of crumbs browned in butter on top gives it the finish a modern palate expects, without changing the dish.
Stuffed eggplant of this kind — boiled or baked, hollowed, the pulp mixed with crumbs and aromatics and returned to the shell — was standard American cookbook fare by the 1890s, arriving through both French kitchen practice and the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern traditions to which the technique is generally traced. Eggplant was still regarded as a somewhat exotic vegetable in the northern United States at the turn of the century, more familiar in the South and in immigrant households, so its appearance in a celebrity cookbook signals a cook with some range. Collections like this one, in which stage performers contributed a favorite dish, were a popular fundraising and publicity format in the first decades of the twentieth century; the recipes are usually short, plainly written, and — as here — the sort of thing that can be assembled from a small pantry between performances. Ethel Levey spent much of the 1910s and 1920s working in London.