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Broiled Eggplant
Slice the eggplant and drain it as for frying; spread the slices on a dish; season with salt and pepper; baste with olive oil; sprinkle with dried bread crumbs and broil.
A four-line recipe that assumes you already know how to prepare eggplant for frying. The salting step it glosses over is the whole point, and the crumbs need watching.
- "Drain it as for frying"This means salt the cut slices and let them sit 30 to 45 minutes, then blot dry. It pulls out water so the slices brown rather than steam, and firms the flesh so it soaks up less oil. Skip it and the crumbs go soggy.
- Slice thicknessCut about half an inch. Thinner slices collapse and scorch under direct heat before the interior cooks; thicker ones stay spongy in the middle unless you drop the rack.
- What "broil" meantBroiling covered both a gridiron over coals and the overhead heat of a range broiler. Under a modern broiler, set the rack 4 to 5 inches from the element and allow roughly 4 to 6 minutes a side, watching closely.
- Crumbs burnDried breadcrumbs under a broiler blacken in a minute or two. Broil the oiled slices first until they are tender and browning, then sprinkle the crumbs on and return them just long enough to colour.
- Be generous with the oilEggplant is mostly water and air; the cells that are not full of moisture will drink oil. Brush both sides rather than basting once, or the surface dries out and turns leathery.
- Salt twice, lightlyThe recipe seasons with salt after the draining step, but salted-and-blotted slices already carry some. Taste before adding more, especially if you did not rinse.
- YieldA medium eggplant will give roughly eight to a dozen slices, enough for three or four as a side dish. Serve it straight off the heat; it turns flabby as it cools.
Eggplant reached American tables slowly. It was grown in the South well before it was common in Northern kitchens, often under the name guinea squash, and nineteenth-century writers treat it as something of a curiosity requiring explanation. By the period of this book the vegetable had settled into the standard repertoire, though it was most often fried. Broiling it with oil and crumbs is the lighter, less wasteful option, and domestic-science writers of the early twentieth century did commonly criticise fried food as indigestible. The technique itself is much older than the book: oiling and grilling sliced eggplant is standard practice across the Mediterranean and the Levant, where the plant has been cultivated for far longer than in the Americas.