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Fried Eggplant
Cut the eggplant in slices about a quarter of an inch thick; pare them; sprinkle with salt and pile one upon another, placing over them a plate with a weight on top. Let stand for an hour; remove the plate; dip the slices in beaten egg, to which has been added a tablespoon of water, half a tablespoon of salt and half a teaspoon of pepper. Then dip the slices in dried bread crumbs; spread on a dish for twenty minutes or more and fry until brown in deep fat.
A straightforward breaded eggplant, and the method holds up almost unchanged. Two details in the original need attention: the salt and the resting time.
- Salt twice, taste onceThe slices are already salted and pressed, so the additional half tablespoon of salt in the egg wash will push the finished dish well past pleasant. A generous pinch in the egg is enough.
- The pressing is the hingeAn hour under a weighted plate draws out water and collapses the spongy cell structure, which is what keeps the slices from drinking oil in the fryer. Do not shorten it, and blot the slices dry before they meet the egg.
- Pare after slicing, as writtenPeeling whole eggplant is awkward; slicing first and then trimming the skin from each round is faster. Modern eggplant skin is thin enough that you can leave it on if you prefer.
- Bitterness is mostly goneOlder eggplant varieties were generally reckoned more bitter than today's, which is one reason salting appears so often in period recipes. Current varieties are bred mild, so the salting is better treated as a texture step than a corrective.
- The twenty-minute restSpreading the breaded slices on a dish lets the crumb coating hydrate and bond to the egg, so it does not slide off in the fat. A wire rack works better than a plate, since the undersides stay dry.
- Deep fat temperatureThe original assumes a cook who judges fat by eye. Aim for 365-375F; below that the slices absorb oil, above it the crumbs brown before the interior turns creamy. Two to three minutes a side is usually enough.
- Dried bread crumbsThis means oven-dried crumbs from stale bread, finer and drier than panko and coarser than the canned sort. Any plain dry crumb works; skip the seasoned varieties, given the salt already in play.
- YieldOne medium eggplant, about 1 lb, will give a dozen or more slices at this thickness and serves about four as a side. Fry in batches and hold in a low oven rather than crowding the pan.
Eggplant came relatively late to American home cooking. It was grown in kitchen gardens through the nineteenth century but was often regarded with suspicion as a nightshade, and it turns up in period cookbooks most often in this form: sliced, salted, breaded and fried, a treatment that makes an unfamiliar vegetable behave like a familiar cutlet. The salting-and-weighting step, still standard in Italian and Middle Eastern practice, does double duty here, drawing off liquid that older varieties carried and compressing the flesh so it fries rather than sponges. The instructions run as a single unbroken chain of semicolons and never pause to explain why any of it works.