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Baked Egg Plant
1 quart diced egg plant 1 cup milk 2 tablespoons butter 2 cups bread crumbs 1/2 teaspoon salt Peel the egg plant, and cut in three-quarter inch cubes. Soak in cold water, to which one tablespoon of salt to one quart of water has been added. Soak one-half hour or more. Cook in boiling, salted water. When tender, drain, add salt and milk, and pour over the egg plant. Melt the butter, and stir in the crumbs. Add the buttered crumbs, and bake in an oiled pan in a moderate oven until set.
A plain vegetable gratin from the meat-substitute chapter, written with the compression typical of early twentieth-century cookbooks — the instructions double back on themselves and assume the cook knows the shape of the dish.
- Read the muddled step"Add salt and milk, and pour over the egg plant" reads as garbled: the sense appears to be that the drained eggplant goes into the oiled pan, the salted milk is poured over it, and the buttered crumbs go on top. Reserving about a third of the crumbs for the surface will help it brown rather than sog.
- Moderate oven350F. "Until set" means the milk has thickened around the eggplant and no longer floods when the dish is tilted — roughly 30 to 40 minutes in a shallow dish.
- Salting and soakingThe half-hour brine draws out bitterness and collapses the sponge-like flesh so it absorbs less fat. Modern eggplant is bred far less bitter, so the soak is now mostly about texture; 20 minutes is plenty, and the eggplant must be drained and pressed well or the finished dish waters out.
- Don't overboilA quart of three-quarter-inch cubes reaches tender in about 5 to 7 minutes in boiling water. Take them off while they still hold their shape — they will cook further in the oven, and overcooked cubes turn to grey paste.
- Bread crumbsSoft crumbs from day-old bread, not the fine dry sandy commercial kind, which will drink the milk and set into a hard cap. Two cups of soft crumbs with two tablespoons of butter is a lean ratio; three or four tablespoons gives a better brown.
- An oiled panAny 8-inch square or 1 1/2-quart baking dish works.
- YieldA quart of diced eggplant cooks down considerably; this serves four as a side, or two to three as a main dish. A grating of cheese over the crumbs is absent here.
Meatless cookery books proliferated in the United States around the First World War, when federal food conservation campaigns urged households to observe meatless days and to find protein and bulk elsewhere. Eggplant was often recommended among meat substitutes less for its nutrition or for it has very little or than for its texture: cooked soft and bound with milk and crumbs, it gives the yielding, savory heft of a scalloped meat dish. The vegetable may have been less familiar in American kitchens of the period, which is perhaps why the recipe bothers to explain the peeling, cubing, and salting that a Mediterranean cook would have taken for granted. The salt soak is the older practice, generally traced to varieties far more bitter than anything sold now, and it survived in print long after the plant breeders had made it half-optional.