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Stuffed Eggplant
Cook eggplant fifteen minutes in boiling salted water to cover. Cut a slice from top, and with a spoon remove pulp, taking care not to work too closely to skin. Chop pulp, and add one cup soft stale bread crumbs. Melt two tablespoons butter, add one-half tablespoon finely chopped onion, and cook five minutes, or try out three slices of bacon, using bacon fat in place of butter. Add to chopped pulp and bread, season with salt and pepper, and if necessary moisten with a little stock or water; cook five minutes, cool slightly, and add one beaten egg. Refill eggplant, cover with buttered bread crumbs, and bake twenty-five minutes in a hot oven.
Fannie Farmer's stuffed eggplant is straightforward once two bits of period shorthand are decoded: the oven temperature and the treatment of the crumbs. A single large eggplant serves two as a main dish or four as a side.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no oven temperatures; "hot" is conventionally read as somewhere around 400-450F. Twenty-five minutes at that heat browns the crumb topping and sets the egg-bound filling; the shell has already been softened by the initial boiling.
- The parboil is the hingeThe parboil matters -- Fifteen minutes in boiling salted water softens the flesh so that the filling needs little more than brief cooking, though a large eggplant may not be cooked right through. Weight the eggplant with a plate to keep it submerged.
- Shell thickness"Not too closely to skin" is not quantified; leaving roughly a quarter inch of flesh is a reasonable reading. Too thin a shell can slump and leak; too thick leaves less filling.
- Soft stale bread crumbsThese are crumbs torn or grated from day-old bread that has dried but not hardened, not the fine dry commercial crumb. About two slices of bread makes the cup called for. Panko is too coarse and dry to absorb the pulp's moisture.
- "Try out three slices of bacon"Try out is rendering: cook the bacon slowly until the fat runs and the meat crisps. Use the fat in place of the two tablespoons of butter. The recipe is silent on the cooked bacon, though it can be chopped into the filling.
- Adding the eggCool the mixture slightly before beating in the egg, as directed, or it will scramble in streaks. Lukewarm to the touch is enough.
- Buttered crumbsDry crumbs tossed with melted butter, roughly a tablespoon of butter to a third of a cup of crumbs. Without the butter they scorch before they colour.
- Baking dishSet the filled shell in a shallow dish that supports it upright; a boiled eggplant is soft and will slump on a flat sheet. A splash of water in the dish keeps the underside from sticking.
Eggplant reached American cookbooks relatively late. It was grown in the South and in market gardens near the big Eastern cities through the nineteenth century, and early recipes almost always call for boiling or long frying rather than eating it barely cooked. By the time this book appeared at the end of the century it had settled into a small, fixed repertoire in American cookery: fried in slices, scalloped, or stuffed as here. The stuffing method itself is old and widely shared, appearing in Turkish and Provençal cooking before Boston, though the bread-crumb-and-egg binding and the buttered crumb top are characteristic of this book, which gives similar stuffed treatments to peppers, tomatoes and onions elsewhere in the vegetable chapter. The recipe also allows bacon fat in place of butter.