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Stuffed Egg-Plant
Cut a medium sized egg-plant into halves. With a knife scoop out the centre of each, leaving a wall with the skin about three-quarters of an inch in thickness. Chop that portion taken from the centre into dice. Peel and cut three good sized tomatoes into dice, and mix with the egg-plant, add two ounces of butter cut into small pieces, a heaping teaspoonful of salt, a quarter teaspoonful of grated nutmeg, a half teaspoonful of pepper and a teaspoonful of chopped onion. Mix all well together and put into the shells. Sprinkle over with bread crumbs, and bake in a moderate oven thirty or forty minutes.
A straightforward baked stuffed eggplant; the only real risks are underbaking the shell and a filling that waters out.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" is usually taken as somewhere around 350F. Thirty to forty minutes at that heat is enough only if the shells are thin-walled and the halves sit cut side up in a shallow dish with a little water; test the wall with a knife tip before serving.
- Salt the shells and the diceA heaping teaspoon of salt is right for the volume of vegetable, but the recipe gives it all at once to the filling. Salting the diced flesh for 20 minutes and blotting it draws out water so the finished stuffing is not soupy.
- TomatoesThree "good sized" tomatoes is roughly a pound and a half. Peel by scoring and dipping in boiling water for 15 seconds, and seed them; the jelly around the seeds is most of the liquid.
- Two ounces of butterFour tablespoons, half a stick. Left in small pieces rather than melted, it melts through the filling as it bakes.
- The onionA single teaspoon of raw chopped onion is a very light hand by modern taste and will stay a little sharp. Softening a small chopped onion in some of the butter first will take that edge off.
- NutmegA quarter teaspoon grated is assertive in a dish this size. Grate it fresh; pre-ground nutmeg has lost most of its volatile oil and will taste dusty rather than warm.
- CrumbsDry crumbs alone tend to scorch before the filling is done. Toss them with a little of the butter, or add them for the last fifteen minutes.
- YieldOne medium eggplant gives two halves — a light main course for two, or four side servings. If yours is over a pound, scale the tomatoes up.
Stuffed eggplant is often associated with summer cookery for a practical reason: the fruit ripens in the heat, and a dish that fills a vegetable shell stretches a small amount of butter and no meat at all across a meal, which suited a season when heavy roasts were avoided and iceboxes were unreliable. Eggplant was still regarded with some suspicion in the earlier part of the century, and early cookbooks are sometimes said to have reassured readers it was wholesome. By the 1880s it appears without apology in general-purpose household books, usually fried in slices or stuffed like this. The nutmeg is a period marker: grated nutmeg in savoury vegetable and cream dishes was a common American seasoning well into the twentieth century, and its near-disappearance from that role is one of the clearer shifts between these books and current cooking.