Maude Fay
SCALLOPED EGGPLANT
Pare an eggplant and cut in half-inch squares. Cook in a little boiling water till soft, then drain. Add a finely chopped onion that has been cooked in two tablespoons of butter and a little chopped parsley. Put in a baking dish, sprinkle with buttered crumbs and bake until crumbs are brown.
Yours truly,
A plain baked eggplant dish that needs only a few decisions the original leaves unmade. Note that the heading promises oysters en brochette but no oyster method follows — what is printed is the scalloped eggplant alone.
- Salt is the missing ingredientThe recipe never mentions seasoning. Salt the eggplant in the cooking water and again when the onion and parsley go in, or the finished dish tastes flat. Pepper is welcome too.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A moderate oven, 350F, browns buttered crumbs in about 20-25 minutes; 400F will do it in 12-15 if the mixture is already hot from the pan.
- Don't drown the eggplant"A little boiling water" means an inch or so, not a full pot. Eggplant absorbs water readily and a waterlogged batch will weep in the baking dish. Drain it well and press out excess before assembling.
- Buttered crumbsPeriod shorthand for dry breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly two tablespoons butter to a cup of crumbs. They brown; unbuttered crumbs merely dry out.
- SizeOne medium eggplant, about 1 lb, fills a small gratin dish and serves three or four as a side. Double it for a family dinner.
- Modern eggplantModern globe eggplants are generally less bitter than older sorts, so salting and draining for bitterness is often unnecessary, though opinions differ. Peeling is still worthwhile, as the recipe says, since the skin toughens in the oven.
- Worth addingA beaten egg or a few tablespoons of grated cheese stirred into the eggplant before baking gives it body; the original version is deliberately austere and can seem loose on the plate.
Maude Fay was an American soprano from San Francisco who built her career at the Munich Court Opera in the years before the First World War, singing Wagner in German houses at a time when few Americans did. Her contribution here is the kind of thing celebrity cookbooks of the period ran on: a short, unfussy household dish signed off with a courtesy, rather than anything grand. Scalloped vegetables — cooked, layered in a dish, topped with buttered crumbs and browned — were a fixture of American home cooking from the late nineteenth century onward, and eggplant was a standard subject. The stray heading "Oysters en Brochette" above the eggplant instructions is unexplained: it may be a compositor's error, a title carried over from elsewhere, or the remnant of an oyster recipe that was dropped.