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Fried Eggplant
With a sharp knife cut a firm eggplant in quarter-inch slices. Trim off the skin, dip each slice in slightly beaten egg, then cover with fine dry bread crumbs. Have some fat heated in a kettle; it should be at least an inch deep and smoking hot. Drop in as many slices as can be cooked at once and fry golden brown. When well colored skim out and drain each piece on soft paper before arranging on a hot platter. Do not pile one on another and do not salt or the pieces will quickly lose their crispness; serve at once.
This method gives a more digestible result than sautéing in a shallow pan, and the preliminary salting and pressing out of the acrid juice can be dispensed with.
A clean deep-fry with no salting step, which modern cooks will find both faster and, in most cases, no worse for it. The variables worth watching are fat temperature and how quickly the slices reach the table.
- "Kettle" and fat depthHere a kettle is any deep, heavy pot, not a tea kettle. An inch of fat in a wide Dutch oven is the right reading; the slices should float and turn rather than sit on the bottom.
- "Smoking hot"Take this as 365-375F rather than literally smoking, which in most modern fats means past their useful point. Below about 350F the crumb coating drinks oil and the eggplant collapses; a cube of bread should brown in under a minute.
- The salting questionThe recipe is right for most of today's produce. Modern market eggplant is generally far less bitter than the older varieties that led nineteenth-century cooks to salt and press it, so the step can usually be skipped. Salting does still draw out water and firm the flesh, which reduces oil uptake, if you have time for thirty minutes.
- Why no salt at the endSalt on a hot fried crust draws moisture to the surface and can soften the coating, which is the recipe's stated reason. Salt the egg wash instead, or salt the crumbs before breading.
- Crumbs"Fine dry bread crumbs" means the plain, sandy kind, not seasoned or panko. Dry crumbs cling to egg better than fresh and brown more evenly at frying heat.
- PeelingThe recipe calls for trimming the skin off. Young supermarket eggplant can be left unpeeled; the ring of skin helps the slice hold together in the fat.
- Draining and holding"Soft paper" is a paper towel, and the instruction not to pile the slices is worth obeying: stacked pieces steam each other. If you must hold a batch, use a rack in a 200F oven, in one layer.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. One medium eggplant, about 1 lb, serves three or four as a side.
Eggplant was slow to gain trust in English-speaking kitchens, still appearing in nineteenth-century American books under the older name "guinea squash" and often accompanied by warnings about its bitterness and its supposed indigestibility. The salt-and-press step this recipe dispenses with was common advice, aimed at drawing off what cookbooks called the acrid or watery juice. The claim that deep frying is more digestible than shallow sautéing belongs to a period habit of ranking cooking methods by their effect on the stomach, though the practical observation behind it holds: a bath of fat at the right heat sets the crumb crust quickly and the slice absorbs less grease than it would turning in a shallow pan.