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Egg Plant
Boil until tender, cut in half, scoop out center. Mash pulp, season with salt, pepper and a little butter, a few drops cream. Fill shells, sprinkle top with bread crumbs and a small piece of butter and brown in oven.
A terse recipe of the kind Mrs. Wilson wrote for newspaper columns, assuming the cook already knows how vegetables behave. The critical point is water: a boiled eggplant holds a great deal of it, and unless it is drained the filling will be soup.
- Boiling wholeSimmer the whole unpeeled eggplant in salted water until a skewer meets no resistance, roughly 15-25 minutes for a medium fruit. Test early; overcooked shells slump and are awkward to fill.
- Drain the pulpAfter scooping, press the pulp in a sieve or squeeze it in a towel before mashing. Boiled eggplant is mostly water, and skipping this step is why the filling will not hold a crumb topping.
- Choose the fruitTwo medium globe eggplants, about 1 lb each, give four sturdy shells. Very large ones have spongier, seedier flesh and thinner walls that tear as you scoop.
- Unstated quantities"A little butter, a few drops cream" is deliberately loose. For the pulp of two medium eggplants, about 2 tablespoons butter is a reasonable reading; keep the cream to the few drops the recipe actually calls for, added last and only if the pulp is stiff.
- Oven for browningThe dish is already cooked, so this stage is colour only. No temperature is given; a hot oven of around 400F for 15-20 minutes will do it, or run it under the broiler for 3-4 minutes, watching it, since buttered crumbs go from gold to black quickly.
- BitternessEggplant sold today is generally less bitter than older varieties, so the old habit of salting and pressing before cooking is optional here.
- CrumbsDry, coarse crumbs work better than fine packaged ones, which pack down and absorb butter into a paste. Dot the butter rather than mixing it in.
- YieldFour halves, serving four as a side dish or two as a light supper with bread and a salad.
Eggplant was grown in American gardens as an ornamental before it was widely eaten, and the name is generally traced to the small white egg-shaped varieties of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gardens rather than the purple globes now sold. By the time Mary A. Wilson was writing, the vegetable had a modest but steady place in Northeastern cookbooks, usually fried in slices or stuffed like this. The stuffed-shell method belongs to a whole family of period recipes -- stuffed tomatoes, stuffed peppers, stuffed onions -- that let a cook stretch a single vegetable into a dish with butter, crumbs and a browned top. Wilson wrote extensively on wartime and postwar household economy, and the compressed, verbless style of this entry is the voice of someone writing for readers who cooked every day.