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Dressed Egg-Plant
Pare the egg-plant, cut into slices, throw them into boiling water, add a teaspoonful of salt and boil twenty minutes. Drain and chop fine. Add to it a large tablespoonful of butter, a level teaspoonful of salt, a dash of pepper, put in a saucepan, stirring continually until boiling hot. Serve in a heated dish.
A plain boiled-and-mashed eggplant, closer to a purée than anything roasted. The whole success of it rests on getting the water out before the butter goes in.
- Drain hardBoiled eggplant holds an enormous amount of water, and the recipe's one-word instruction to "drain" is doing heavy lifting. Press the chopped flesh in a sieve or twist it in a towel, or the finished dish will be soup rather than a dressed vegetable.
- Twenty minutes is not a misprintModern cooks are used to keeping eggplant firm, but this dish wants it collapsing so it can be chopped to a paste. Slices of about half an inch will be fully soft well before twenty minutes; check at twelve and stop when a knife meets no resistance.
- Salting and bitternessOlder eggplant cultivars could be markedly bitter, which is the usual explanation for period recipes that salt or parboil them. Varieties sold today have largely been bred away from that bitterness, so the pre-salting step other books call for can reasonably be skipped here.
- A large tablespoonfulSpoon measures of the period were not standardised, and "large" pushes the amount up further. Figure on a generous 1 to 1.5 tablespoons of butter for one medium eggplant, and add more to taste once it is hot.
- The reheating stepReturning the mash to the pan and stirring until boiling hot is what drives off the last of the water and marries the butter in. Keep the heat moderate and the spoon moving; the purée is thick and scorches on the bottom easily.
- YieldOne medium eggplant of about 1 lb gives roughly a cup to a cup and a half of purée once well drained, enough for two or three as a side dish. It collapses far more than raw volume suggests.
- ServingThe heated dish is not a flourish. This purée goes lukewarm and pasty within minutes, so warm the serving bowl and bring it straight to the table.
Eggplant was still faintly exotic in English-language cookery when books like this were written; it appears in American kitchen gardens through the nineteenth century, sometimes grown as an ornamental "egg plant" — the name comes from early white, egg-shaped varieties. Household manuals of the period often treated it cautiously, parboiling it first to tame the bitterness common in older cultivars, though period books also fry, bake and stuff it. "Dressed" here carries its plain older sense of seasoned and finished with butter, the same usage as dressed potatoes or dressed cabbage, and the recipe's technique is a straightforward one: boil, chop, enrich, reheat.