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Eggplant Baked in Shell
4 small eggplants 1/2 cup bread crumbs 1/4 cup minced chicken 2 tablespoons shortening few grains salt paprika and cayenne 1 egg Boil eggplants 20 minutes, in salted water. Cut in halves lengthwise. Scoop out center. Drain on cheese cloth. Mix this scooped out part, chicken, salt, paprika, cayenne and egg. Fill eggplant shells with this mixture, cover with buttered and seasoned bread crumbs, and bake in a slow oven about 1 hour. Leftover meat or vegetables may be used in place of chicken. Serves eight.
A straightforward stuffed-eggplant dish from the era when "small eggplant" meant something closer to a large egg than the softball-sized fruit sold today. The recipe assumes the chicken is already cooked.
- Oven temperature"Slow oven" in this period is usually taken as somewhere around 300-325F. An hour at that heat is right for shells that have already been boiled; the point is to set the egg and dry the filling, not to brown it hard.
- The chicken must be cookedThe chicken is best taken as cooked -- The recipe does not specify, but the closing line about leftover meat suggests the quarter cup of minced chicken was leftover roast or boiled meat. Raw chicken folded into a filling and held at a slow oven temperature may not reliably reach a safe temperature in the center of a packed shell.
- Eggplant sizeFour "small" eggplants yielding eight halves implies fruit considerably smaller than the modern globe eggplant, though no weight is given. Use small Italian or Japanese types, or halve two medium ones and expect four portions.
- Boiling timeTwenty minutes in salted water is generous for small eggplant and will leave the flesh very soft. Ten to twelve minutes is enough for shells that still hold their shape when scooped.
- Drain thoroughlyThis is the hinge. Eggplant is mostly water, and the cheesecloth draining of the scooped flesh is what keeps the filling from collapsing into a wet mass. Press it, do not just let it sit.
- ShorteningThe recipe does not say where the two tablespoons of shortening go; since the filling is bound with egg and the crumbs are called "buttered," it was most likely for the crumb topping and the dish. Butter does the same job with better flavor.
- Seasoning"Few grains" of salt is a pinch. Paprika and cayenne together with no quantity given: start with a quarter teaspoon paprika and a pinch of cayenne for the whole batch and adjust, as the filling is bland without them.
- YieldEight halves, one per person, as a side or light supper dish. As a main course it will serve four.
Stuffed eggplant reached American cookbooks by way of Mediterranean and Near Eastern kitchens, where the hollowed-and-refilled vegetable is a standard form, and it suited the domestic-science era's enthusiasm for using up small quantities of cooked meat. The note that "leftover meat or vegetables may be used in place of chicken" is the real message of the recipe: the eggplant shell is a vessel, and the quarter cup of minced chicken is whatever the Sunday bird left behind.