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Scalloped Eggplant
Pare an eggplant and cut in two-thirds inch cubes.
Cook in a small quantity of boiling water until soft, then drain. Cook two tablespoons butter with one-half onion, finely chopped, until yellow, add three-fourths tablespoon finely chopped parsley and eggplant. Turn into a buttered baking-dish. Cover with buttered crumbs and bake until crumbs are brown.
A plain gratin that depends entirely on how thoroughly the eggplant is drained. Fannie Farmer assumes the reader knows what "buttered crumbs" means and gives no oven temperature, no salt and no yield.
- The hinge: get the water outBoiled eggplant holds an enormous amount of liquid, and if it goes into the dish wet the crumbs steam rather than brown. Drain in a colander and press gently with the back of a spoon before combining with the onion and butter.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. Since the eggplant is already cooked through, the only job is browning the top, so a hot oven (around 400F) for roughly 15 to 20 minutes will do it; watch the crumbs rather than the clock.
- Buttered crumbsIn this book the phrase refers to a standing preparation: breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter, in the order of a cup of crumbs to a couple of tablespoons of butter. Dry commercial crumbs work but absorb less and brown faster.
- Eggplant sizeThe recipe just says 'an eggplant'; a 1 to 1 1/2 lb globe type is a reasonable modern stand-in. The two-thirds inch cubes are large enough to hold their shape after boiling.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is specified. Salt the boiling water and season again after draining, since boiled eggplant is very bland.
- OnionHalf an onion is roughly 1/4 cup chopped. Cook it in the butter only until translucent and pale gold -- the recipe says 'until yellow'; browning it changes the character of the dish.
- YieldOne eggplant serves four as a side dish, baked in a shallow 1-quart dish so there is a good ratio of crumb to filling.
Eggplant reached American cookbooks slowly, and its treatment in the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book is plain: pared, boiled, and topped with crumbs. Farmer's vegetable chapter runs on a small set of interchangeable methods, and "scalloped" is one of them, meaning a buttered dish layered or topped with buttered crumbs and browned in the oven, applied with equal readiness to oysters, potatoes, tomatoes and cabbage. Southern and Creole kitchens of the same era were stuffing and frying eggplant, often with garlic and tomato; the Boston treatment is milder, in keeping with the school's mission of teaching reliable, plain cooking. The vegetable was also known as "guinea squash" in parts of the American South in the nineteenth century.