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Creamed Egg Plant
1 quart diced egg plant 1 pint water 1 cup milk 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon celery salt Peel the egg plant, and cut into three-quarter inch cubes. Cook in boiling, salted water. When tender, drain off the liquid. Make a white sauce of the milk, flour, butter, celery salt and one-half the salt. Mix the egg plant with the white sauce, and cook a few minutes.
A plain white-sauce vegetable dish from the meat-substitute chapter, and it works as written provided the eggplant is drained hard. The one thing that ruins it is waterlogged flesh thinning the sauce.
- Quantities in modern termsA quart of diced eggplant is about 4 cups, roughly one large or two small globe eggplants once peeled. A pint of water is 2 cups, enough to cook the cubes in a wide saucepan without swamping them.
- Drain, then drain againEggplant holds an enormous amount of water. After draining, let the cubes sit in the colander several minutes and press gently, or the sauce will slacken to soup the moment they are combined.
- Cooking timeThree-quarter-inch cubes are tender in 6 to 8 minutes at a bare boil. Past that they collapse into puree, which is fine for texture but makes the dish indistinguishable from a thick soup.
- The white sauceTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to one cup milk is a medium sauce. Cook the roux a minute before adding the milk so it does not taste of raw flour, and add the milk gradually off the heat.
- Salt dividedThe recipe puts one-half the teaspoon of salt in the sauce; the remainder is presumably what salts the cooking water, though the text does not say so outright. Taste before adding all of it, since butter salt levels vary.
- Celery saltStill sold. Commercial blends vary in strength, so start with an eighth of a teaspoon and taste before using the full quarter.
- BitternessOlder eggplant varieties were noticeably bitter, which is why period recipes often called for salting and standing. Current supermarket varieties rarely need it.
- YieldServes four as a side, or two to three as a main. A handful of buttered crumbs browned on top turns it into a scalloped dish.
Meatless cookbooks proliferated in the United States around the First World War, when Food Administration campaigns urged households to observe meatless days and to stretch protein with vegetables, dairy and eggs. Eggplant suited that literature because its dense, absorbent flesh reads as substantial on the plate in a way that most boiled vegetables do not, and a milk-and-butter white sauce supplied fat and protein without meat. The technique here is the standard American "creamed" formula that appears across the period applied to onions, celery, carrots and dried beef alike: cook the vegetable in salted water, bind it with a medium white sauce, serve hot. Celery salt, a commercial seasoning available by the late nineteenth century, was a usual shortcut for savory depth in a dish with no stock in it.