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Egg Plant
Cut in slices one half inch thick. Remove skin, sprinkle with salt, pile slices one on another, cover with plate and weight, let stand over night. Drain, wash in cold water. Dry, dip in crumbs, egg and crumbs, or in batter, and fry in deep fat.
A straightforward fried eggplant, with an overnight salting step that modern cooks have largely compressed. The salting is the whole point of the method, and it is worth understanding before shortening it.
- The overnight pressSalting under a weighted plate draws out water and collapses the spongy cells so the slices absorb less fat. Older market eggplants were also genuinely bitter; today's cultivars are bred against that, so 30 to 60 minutes of salting achieves the texture benefit without an overnight wait. If you do leave it overnight, refrigerate it.
- Wash and dry properlyThe rinse removes surface salt, but wet slices will not hold a coating and will spit in the fat. Press each slice firmly between towels until the surface is matte.
- "Crumbs, egg and crumbs"This is the standard three-stage breading, written in shorthand: dry crumbs first (they give the egg something to grip on a slick vegetable), then beaten egg, then crumbs again. Use dry fine crumbs rather than fresh, and let the breaded slices rest 10 minutes before frying so the coating sets.
- Batter alternativeThe recipe assumes a standard frying batter is to be had from elsewhere in the book. Any thin flour-and-egg batter, about the consistency of heavy cream, works; thicker batter slides off the smooth cut face.
- Deep fat temperatureThe recipe gives none; 365 to 375F is the usual modern range. Below that the slices drink oil; above it the crumbs brown before the interior turns creamy. Two or three slices at a time so the fat does not drop.
- PeelingThe recipe removes the skin, which suits the large thick-skinned varieties of the period. Smaller modern eggplants have thin skin that holds the slices together in the pan and can be left on.
- YieldOne medium eggplant, about 1 lb, gives 8 to 10 slices at half an inch and serves three or four as a side. Drain on a rack rather than paper so the undersides stay crisp, and salt after frying only lightly, given the soak.
Eggplant was a slow arrival on American tables, still described in nineteenth-century garden books as a curiosity grown as much for ornament as for the pot, and it appears in turn-of-the-century cookbooks frequently in this form: sliced, salted, breaded and fried, though stuffed and baked versions are common in the same period. Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it padded out its confectionery chapters with a full general household repertoire, which is why a plain vegetable entry sits in a book best remembered for its chocolate. The instruction to salt overnight under a weight reflects a real difference in the vegetable: the varieties then available were larger, seedier and more bitter than the ones bred since, and cooks were taught to treat bitterness as a defect to be pressed out rather than a trait to be ignored.