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Baked Eggplant
Make a dressing as for stuffed peppers, using, however, a little more salt, pepper and butter. Cut the eggplant in two lengthwise; scrape out the inside; mash it fine; mix with the dressing and return to the shells. Place on a pan in the oven and bake forty-five minutes. Serve in the shells, placing a doily under each half.
A loose-leaf entry that assumes you have already read the stuffed pepper recipe a page or two earlier. The gaps are all in the preparation of the shell, not the baking.
- The dressing it refers toThe cross-referenced stuffed pepper dressing is not reproduced here, so its exact contents are unknown; period pepper dressings typically run to soft breadcrumbs moistened with milk or stock, chopped onion cooked in butter, salt and pepper, sometimes an egg to bind. Something on the order of 2 cups of crumbs should fill two eggplant halves.
- Soften the flesh firstRaw eggplant will not "mash fine." Either bake the halved eggplant cut side down for 20-25 minutes before scooping, or scoop the cubes out and simmer them in a little salted water until collapsing, then drain hard. This is the step the recipe takes for granted.
- Drain it wellEggplant is mostly water, and the single thing that ruins this dish is a soupy filling that slumps out of the shell. Press the cooked pulp in a sieve before mixing it with the crumbs.
- SaltingModern eggplant varieties are generally reckoned less bitter than older ones, so the old salt-and-drain step is probably optional for flavor. It still helps draw out moisture if you are working with a large, seedy specimen.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Forty-five minutes suits a moderate oven, 350F. If the top is not browning near the end, raise the heat to 400F for the last ten minutes or run it briefly under the broiler.
- Leave a wallScrape to about a quarter inch of skin. Go further and the shell tears in the oven; leave much more and the halves are unpleasantly firm at the table.
- The doilyA paper or linen doily under each half on the serving plate, as the recipe directs. Presentation, and easily skipped.
- YieldOne medium eggplant gives two stuffed halves, enough for two as a main vegetable course or four as a side.
Eggplant reached American cookbooks slowly and was still treated as a curiosity in much of the country when Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf collection appeared. It was grown seriously in some American market gardens, and Southern books carried recipes for it well before Northern ones did; nineteenth-century writers commonly called it "guinea squash," a name often said to point to arrival via the Atlantic trade rather than to its actual origin in South and Southeast Asia, though that reading is folk etymology. The treatment here, stuffing a scooped shell with the pulp bound in seasoned breadcrumbs, is often described as a typical American handling of the vegetable, and its placement in a loose-leaf book, cross-referenced to the stuffed pepper dressing, shows how these collections were built: one dressing, several vegetables, the housekeeper expected to hold the pages together herself.