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To Bake Egg-Plant
Parboil the egg-plant. Take out the meat and mix it with butter, pepper, salt, and bread crumbs. Fill the hulls with this mixture and bake a dark brown. Cucumbers may be prepared by the same recipe.
A terse nineteenth-century formula for stuffed eggplant, written for cooks who already knew the shape of the dish. The quantities are left entirely to judgment, so a few decisions have to be made before starting.
- ParboilingHalve the eggplant lengthwise and simmer 8-10 minutes, until a knife slips into the flesh but the shell still holds its shape. Whole eggplants take closer to 15 minutes and are awkward to hollow out afterward.
- Scooping the shellsLeave about a quarter inch of flesh attached to the skin. Any thinner and the hull collapses in the oven; any thicker and there is little filling left.
- SaltingOlder eggplants can carry real bitterness, and it is often suggested that this is part of why period recipes parboil or salt them first, though this recipe gives no reason. Modern supermarket varieties are generally bred milder, so salting is optional; draining the chopped flesh in a colander keeps the stuffing from going soupy.
- ProportionsFor one medium eggplant, figure 2 tablespoons butter and about 1/2 cup dry bread crumbs, plus a little more crumb scattered on top for the browning. Add crumbs until the mixture mounds on a spoon rather than slumping.
- Oven"Bake a dark brown" gives no temperature. Use 375-400F for 25-30 minutes; finish under the broiler for a minute or two if the top is still pale. The flesh is largely cooked from the parboiling, so this step is mostly about color and crust.
- The cucumber variantCucumbers hold far more water than eggplant and go limp fast. Parboil them only 3-4 minutes, drain the scooped flesh hard, and expect a soft, custardy result rather than a firm shell.
- SeasoningButter, salt and pepper is the whole of it, which is very much the period's idea of restraint. Grated onion, a little cheese, or a spoonful of the parboiling water for moisture are all in keeping without turning it into a different dish.
- YieldOne medium eggplant, halved, serves two as a side dish or one as a light supper.
Eggplant was grown in the South by the mid-nineteenth century, and Southern cookbooks of the period treat it as an ordinary garden vegetable rather than a novelty. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, is a collection of contributions from a long list of Virginia housekeepers, which accounts for the clipped, note-to-self quality of entries like this one: they were written by women recording what they already knew for readers assumed to know it too. Stuffing a hollowed vegetable with its own flesh bound with crumbs and butter is a technique the book uses elsewhere as well, and, as the closing line here suggests, it could be applied to whatever else was ripe at once. The casual "cucumbers may be prepared by the same recipe" is a reminder that cooked cucumber was a normal thing to eat before it became almost exclusively a salad vegetable.