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Baked Egg-Plant
Wash the egg-plant, put in a kettle, cover with boiling water and boil about half an hour or until tender. Then take it out, cut it into halves and carefully scrape out the soft portion. Leave the skin unbroken and a wall of sufficient thickness to hold it in position. Chop the eggplant that you have scraped out, add to it a half cup of crumbs, a large tablespoonful of butter, a half teaspoonful of salt and a palatable seasoning of salt and pepper. Mix well, put back in the skins, sprinkle the top lightly with bread crumbs and put in the oven a few minutes to brown.
A plain stuffed eggplant, boiled first rather than baked, which is faster than it sounds and gives a very soft filling. A few of the original's instructions need translating.
- Boil whole, and prick itThe eggplant goes into the water uncut. Pierce the skin two or three times with a knife tip first so steam escapes and the fruit does not split along one side, which ruins the shell you need later.
- Half an hour is for a large oneA globe eggplant of about 1 1/2 lb will be tender in 20 to 30 minutes; the slim Japanese and Italian types are done in 10 to 15. Test with a skewer at the thickest point rather than watching the clock.
- KettleIn this period a kettle is any large deep pot, not a tea kettle. Use a stockpot wide enough that the eggplant stays submerged, weighted with a plate if it floats.
- Scrape the shell carefullyThis is the hinge of the recipe. Leave a good quarter inch of flesh attached to the skin; go thinner and the halves collapse the moment you fill them. Drain the cut shells upside down on a towel while you make the filling.
- The salt is listed twiceA half teaspoon is called for, then "a palatable seasoning of salt and pepper." Use the half teaspoon, taste the mixture, and adjust. Boiled eggplant is watery and takes more salt than you expect.
- Crumbs"Crumbs" here is most likely dry bread crumbs rather than the coarse fresh kind, though the recipe does not specify. If the chopped flesh is very wet, add another few tablespoons until the mixture holds a shape on the spoon.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the original leaves the heat to the cook's judgement. For browning a crumb top on already-cooked food, 425F for 10 to 15 minutes, or a few minutes under the broiler, watching it.
- YieldOne medium eggplant gives two halves, which is two generous servings as a side dish or a light supper for two with bread and a salad.
The name appears to be literal: many of the aubergine varieties grown in eighteenth-century European and American gardens were small, smooth and white, closer to a hen's egg than to the deep purple globes now sold, and "egg-plant" is generally traced to that resemblance. Some nineteenth-century American writers were wary of the plant — it belongs to the nightshade family, and it was sometimes grown as an ornamental — but stuffed eggplant appears in a good many books of the period in a form much like this one: boiled or parboiled, hollowed, mixed with crumbs and butter, and browned. The preliminary boiling may reflect a kitchen where oven time was costly and unevenly controlled; softening the vegetable on the stovetop meant the oven was needed only for the last few minutes of color.