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Aubergines Farcies
(Stuffed Egg Plant.) Ingredients.
Two medium-sized Egg Plants.
Two ounces of Butter.
The text as it survives here is only the opening of the entry — a title and the first two ingredients — so it cannot be followed straight through. What follows is what a cook needs to know to place it, plus the standing points that govern any stuffed aubergine of this period.
- The text is a fragmentTwo medium aubergines and two ounces of butter is the head of an ingredient list, not a complete one. Expect the missing lines to have run to breadcrumbs or cooked rice, onion, herbs, seasoning and very likely an egg to bind, with grated cheese or crumbs over the top.
- Two ounces of butterThat is 4 tablespoons, 57 g. It would cover frying the scooped flesh with onion and enriching the stuffing; it is not enough to fry the shells in as well.
- Medium-sized egg plantsThe book gives no weight. If the two fruit are of the size now sold as medium, they will give four halves, enough for a first course for four or a light main for two.
- SaltingModern cultivars are bred against bitterness and rarely need degorging for flavour, but salting the cut halves for 30 minutes and blotting them still collapses the sponge structure so the flesh drinks less butter.
- OvenThe fragment gives no oven instruction. Pre-bake or blanch the halved shells until the flesh yields before filling; a raw shell will still be leathery when the stuffing has browned.
- If the stuffing contains fishBring the filled halves to 165F / 74C at the centre, roughly 25-30 minutes, and use fish that was cooked and chilled promptly rather than held at room temperature while the shells bake.
- Use a complete recipeGiven the missing method, cook this from a full modern recipe for stuffed aubergine and let the fragment tell you what kind of dish was intended rather than how to build it.
The aubergine reached European kitchens by way of the Arab Mediterranean, and English called it "egg plant" from the small white ovoid varieties grown as curiosities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — the name stuck long after the purple sorts took over the market. British cooks were slow to trust it, and it often appears in nineteenth-century cookery books under its French name, as here, which suggests the dish belongs to the professional or "high class" repertoire rather than the family table. Farci simply means stuffed, and the method — halve, hollow, chop and season the flesh, return it to the shell, gratinate — is the standard French treatment applied to marrow, tomato, onion and cucumber alike.