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Fried Eggplant
Peel and cut eggplant in half inch slices, sprinkle with salt and pepper. Arrange on plate, placing a weight over in order to press out juice, and set aside for one hour or more; drain, and dry each slice by rolling in seasoned flour, and fry crisp in plenty of sweet drippings.
A plain skillet-fried eggplant that depends almost entirely on the salting step. Everything else is a dredge and a hot pan.
- The hinge: don't cut the hour shortSalting and weighting collapses the sponge-like cell structure so the slices absorb far less fat and lose their bitter edge. An hour is a minimum; ninety minutes under a plate and a can or two is better. Press out and blot the liquid before flouring.
- "Sweet drippings"Sweet here means fresh and unsoured, not sugared -- clean rendered beef, pork or bacon fat kept from earlier cooking. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point stands in; a spoonful of bacon fat added to the oil gets closer to the intended flavor.
- "Plenty of" means shallow-fryingAim for about a quarter inch of fat in a heavy skillet, at 350-365F. Less than that and the flour coating soaks rather than crisps.
- Seasoned flourThe original assumes salt and pepper in the flour. Since the slices were already salted and then drained, go light -- a teaspoon of salt per cup of flour is enough.
- Dry the slices firstRolling wet eggplant in flour makes a paste that slides off in the pan. Press each slice between towels, then dredge and shake off the excess.
- Batches and drainingCrowding the pan drops the fat temperature and steams the coating. Fry in single layers, two to three minutes a side, and drain on a rack rather than paper so the undersides stay crisp.
- YieldOne medium eggplant, about 1 1/4 lb, gives roughly ten to twelve slices and serves four as a side dish.
Eggplant reached American tables slowly -- it was grown as an ornamental curiosity well before it was widely eaten, and nineteenth-century cookbooks often felt obliged to explain what it was. By the time menu-and-recipe books of this sort were being printed, frying was the standard American treatment: peel, salt, flour, fry. The salting instruction reflects older varieties, which were noticeably more bitter than the cultivars sold today; the pressing survives now mostly for the practical reason that it limits how much fat the slices drink.