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Some Kitchen Kinks: Eggplant
Put the dish in a moderately hot oven and bake the peppers one hour, basting often with the sauce in the dish. Peppers may also be filled with a well-seasoned dressing of chopped meat, made with or without the addition of bread crumbs or rice. Eggplant.-This vegetable, as well as potato and tomato, belongs to the nightshade family. Like all succulent green vegetables, it has little nutritive value. The common methods of cooking are by frying, broiling, and baking.
Baked Eggplant.
For baked eggplant make a dressing as for stuffed peppers, except that a little more salt, pepper, and butter are used. Cut the eggplant in two lengthwise, scrape out the inside, and mash it fine, then mix with the dressing and return to the shells.
Place on a pan and in the oven. Cook forty-five minutes.
Fried Eggplant.
For fried eggplant cut the vegetable in slices about half an inch thick and pare. Sprinkle the slices with salt and pile them upon one another, put a plate with a weight on top of the slices. Let them rest for an hour, then remove weight and plate. Add one tablespoonful of water, half a tablespoonful of salt, and half a teaspoonful of pepper to an egg. Beat well. Dip the slices of eggplant in the egg, then in dried bread crumbs. Spread on a dish for twenty or more minutes. Fry till brown (in deep fat).
Broiled Eggplant.
The eggplant is sliced and drained as directed above. Then spread the slices on a dish, season with pepper, and baste with salad oil, sprinkle with dried bread crumbs and broil.
Four eggplant treatments run together here, with the tail end of a stuffed-pepper recipe attached to the front. The salting-and-pressing step is the one that carries all four.
- Where the recipe startsThe first two sentences belong to the stuffed peppers on the previous page; the eggplant instructions begin at "Eggplant.-This vegetable." The baked version tells you to make "a dressing as for stuffed peppers," which the pepper text describes as a well-seasoned dressing of chopped meat, made with or without bread crumbs or rice.
- Oven and broiler numbers"Moderately hot" was conventionally taken as roughly 375-400F, though the book uses that phrase for the peppers only and gives no temperature at all for the eggplant. Around 375F for 45 minutes suits halves of a medium fruit. For the broiled slices, use a hot broiler with the pan 4-5 inches below the element and turn once; 4-6 minutes a side browns the crumbs before the flesh collapses.
- Salting and pressingThis is the hinge. An hour under a weighted plate draws out water and firms the flesh so the slices absorb far less frying fat. Modern eggplant is bred less bitter than 1908 stock, but the pressing still matters for texture. Rinse the salt off and pat the slices thoroughly dry, or the egg wash will slide.
- The salt in the egg washHalf a tablespoonful of salt to a single egg is far too much on slices that have already spent an hour under salt. A pinch is enough. Scale the egg wash to the eggplant as well: one egg with a tablespoon of water coats perhaps six slices.
- Deep-fat temperatureThe original just says fry till brown. Hold the fat at 360-375F. Cooler and the crumb coat drinks oil; hotter and the crust darkens before the interior turns creamy. Fry in batches and drain on a rack rather than paper so the coating stays crisp.
- Resting the breaded slicesThe twenty minutes on a dish after crumbing is not filler. It lets the coating hydrate and grip, so it does not shed in the fat. A rack works better than a flat dish.
- Peeling"Cut in slices about half an inch thick and pare" means slice first, then trim the skin from each round. Young eggplant skin is thin enough to leave on, and it helps the slices hold together in the fryer.
- On "little nutritive value"Period nutrition judged food almost entirely by calories, protein and fat, so watery vegetables were dismissed. Eggplant is indeed low in calories but the framing is obsolete; ignore it.
- YieldOne medium eggplant, about 1 lb, gives two baked halves or roughly ten to twelve half-inch slices, serving two to four.
Eggplant is Solanum melongena, domesticated in South and East Asia and carried west by Arab traders into the Mediterranean, where Italian and Provencal cooks took to it long before English-speaking ones did. The author's opening note that it belongs to the nightshade family, alongside potato and tomato, reflects a lingering Anglo-American suspicion of the whole group: the plant was often grown ornamentally in colonial gardens before it was eaten freely, and its older English names, "mad apple" and "raging apple," preserve the folklore that it disturbed the mind. By the time Household Discoveries appeared in the first decade of the twentieth century, eggplant was a familiar market vegetable in American cities, and the three methods given here, frying in deep fat, broiling with oil and crumbs, and baking the scooped shells with a bread dressing, are the treatments that fill the eggplant entries of period cookbooks. The salting-under-a-weight step, given here for the fried slices and carried over to the broiled ones, is a long-established piece of eggplant technique in the Western kitchen.