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Egg-Plant Pudding
Quarter the egg-plant and lay it in salt and water the over-night, to extract the bitterness. The next day, parboil, peel and chop fine, and add bread crumbs (one teacup to a pint of egg-plant), eggs (two to a pint of egg-plant), salt, pepper, and butter to taste; enough milk to make a good batter. Bake in an earthen dish twenty minutes.--Mrs. R. L. O.
A plain vegetable custard, closer to a spoonbread than to a pudding in the sweet sense. The original assumes you know the oven and gives no temperature, so a few decisions have to be made for it.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Treat it as a moderate oven, 350F. Twenty minutes will only set a shallow layer; a dish 1 1/2 to 2 inches deep needs 35 to 45 minutes, until the centre is just firm and no longer wobbles as a liquid.
- MeasuresA teacup in books of this period is usually reckoned smaller than a modern 8-ounce cup, commonly somewhere between 1/2 and 3/4 cup. A pint of chopped egg-plant is 2 cups by volume after chopping, which may take rather less than one whole medium egg-plant. So: 2 cups egg-plant, about 3/4 cup crumbs, 2 eggs.
- "Enough milk to make a good batter"Start with about 1/2 cup and add slowly. You want the consistency of thick pancake batter, loose enough to pour but not thin, or the custard will weep.
- The overnight saltingModern cultivated egg-plant has been bred away from the bitterness this step was meant to fix, so the soak is optional. It still firms the flesh and draws out water, which is worth having in a custard, but 30 to 60 minutes in salted water is plenty.
- Parboil, then drain hardThis is the hinge. Boiled egg-plant holds a great deal of water; press the cooked flesh in a colander or squeeze it in a towel before chopping, or the pudding will separate into a set top and a grey puddle beneath.
- Earthen dishAny glazed stoneware, earthenware or glass baking dish. Earthenware heats gently and does not react with the vegetable, which may be why it was named; a metal pan will work but browns the edges faster.
- Bread crumbsThese should be soft crumbs from stale bread, not dry commercial crumbs, which absorb far more liquid. If using dry crumbs, cut the quantity by about a third and expect to add more milk.
- Yield and servingAs written it makes about 4 side-dish servings. It was a supper or dinner vegetable, served hot from the dish alongside meat, not a dessert.
Egg-plant appears with real confidence in Southern cookery books of the nineteenth century, and it is often suggested that the long growing season along the Chesapeake and further south had something to do with it, though the vegetable turns up in Northern books of the period too. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, was assembled from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housekeepers, which is why so many receipts end as this one does, with a set of initials rather than an author. The instruction to soak overnight in salt water reflects older varieties that really were bitter and seedy, a problem breeders have largely eliminated. Calling the dish a pudding follows the older, broader English sense of the word: a soft baked or boiled dish bound with eggs and crumbs, savoury as often as sweet, of which Yorkshire pudding is the surviving example most people still recognise.