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Salt and Pepper (One gill of Demi-glace Sauce)
One gill of Demi-glace Sauce.
Cut the egg plants lengthwise in half, scoop out a portion of the inside to make room for the stuffing.
Chop the bacon, mushrooms and suet finely.
Put the butter and bacon in a stewpan; when hot add the shalots and fry a little. Mix the suet, parsley, breadcrumbs (previously soaked in a little milk) and Parmesan cheese in a basin. Season them with pepper and salt, add the butter and shalots, the yolk of an egg, or, if necessary, the whole egg, mix well, then put this stuffing in the aubergines.
Arrange them in a buttered sauté-pan, sprinkle them over with a mixture of breadcrumbs and grated cheese; bake them in a moderate oven for about an hour, dish them up, and serve with Demi-glace sauce.
A stuffed aubergine recipe printed without its ingredient list — the quantities were evidently meant to sit above the method and only the gill of demi-glace survived into this entry. Everything else has to be judged by proportion.
- Missing quantitiesThe original gives no weights for bacon, mushrooms, suet, breadcrumbs or cheese. For two medium aubergines, a workable set is 4 oz bacon, 4 oz mushrooms, 2 oz suet, 3 oz breadcrumbs and 2 oz Parmesan, but this is a reconstruction rather than the book's own measure.
- A gillA quarter of a pint, 5 fl oz or about 140 ml, of demi-glace — a sauce quantity for the whole dish rather than per person.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F / 175-190C. An hour at that heat suits a dense raw-suet stuffing in an aubergine shell; the flesh should collapse to softness and the crumb top brown.
- ShalotsShallots. The recipe gives no quantity; two or three chopped fine would suit a stuffing of this size.
- SuetBeef suet was a standard binder and fat source in forcemeats of this period. Shredded packet suet works; grated cold butter or finely chopped fatty pork are the closest substitutes if suet is unavailable.
- Sauté-panIn this period the term covers a shallow, straight-sided metal pan that goes from hob to oven. Any ovenproof frying pan or a buttered shallow gratin dish will do.
- Salt the shellsThe recipe omits it, but scooped aubergine halves benefit from a light salting and 20 minutes' draining before filling, or the finished dish waters down the stuffing.
- The hingeSoak the breadcrumbs in milk and squeeze them out before mixing. Dry crumbs will drink the egg and suet fat and the stuffing sets solid rather than moist.
- YieldThe original states no number of aubergines; on the reconstructed quantities above, two aubergines halved would serve four as a first course or two as a main with the sauce.
Aubergines reached British high-class kitchens largely through French practice, which is why this book calls them aubergines in the method and egg plants in the first line — the two names ran side by side in English cookery writing well into the twentieth century. The treatment here is the classic aubergines farcies: halve, hollow, fill with a forcemeat bound with soaked crumb and egg, gratinate with crumbs and cheese. The demi-glace points to a professional kitchen: a brown sauce built from reduced espagnole and stock, kept made up in quantity and drawn off as needed, and its casual appearance at the head of the recipe suggests a cook with such a sauce already to hand.