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Fried Eggplant
Pare and slice the eggplant as desired and dip at once into egg (previously seasoned with salt and pepper) and then into cornstarch, seeing to it that every part is well covered. Fry in deep hot fat to a rich brown. Lay on brown paper until served, to absorb any extra grease. Eggplant cooked in this way will be found very delicate and digestible.
A short recipe that assumes you know how deep frying behaves. The two things it does not tell you are the fat temperature and the fact that eggplant discolors within a minute of being cut.
- "Dip at once"Cut eggplant browns fast and weeps, so it is worth slicing and coating one piece at a time rather than paring the whole fruit first. The recipe does not say why it wants the dipping done immediately; discoloration and surface moisture are the likely reasons.
- Fat temperatureThe recipe gives none. In practice, deep frying of this kind works at roughly 365-375F: below that the slices soak up oil and stay limp; much above it the cornstarch coating colors before the flesh softens.
- Thickness"As desired" is broad. Quarter-inch rounds cook through in the time it takes the crust to brown, roughly two to three minutes; anything over half an inch needs a lower fat temperature and longer, or the center stays chalky.
- Cornstarch, not flourWorth keeping as written. Cornstarch fries thinner and crisper than wheat flour and does not go bready. Whether that is what the writer meant by "delicate" is not stated.
- SaltingModern eggplant varieties are bred with little of the bitterness that older cooks salted out, so the recipe's omission of a salting step is no longer a problem. Salting still draws out water and gives a firmer slice if you have time for it.
- DrainingBrown paper was the standard drain of the era. Use a rack over a sheet pan instead; paper traps steam under the slices and softens the crust from below.
- YieldOne medium eggplant, about a pound and a quarter, gives four modest side servings. Fry in batches and keep finished slices in a 200F oven rather than crowding the pan.
Eggplant reached American tables slowly. It was grown ornamentally in the eighteenth century and, by an account often repeated though closer to received tradition than documented fact, treated with suspicion as a nightshade relative, and only in the later nineteenth century did seed catalogs and cookbooks push it as a vegetable in its own right, usually fried, stuffed or scalloped. The closing line here is the giveaway for the period: "very delicate and digestible" answers an anxiety that ran through turn-of-the-century domestic writing, where fried food was widely blamed for indigestion and a cook needed reassuring that a deep-fried vegetable would not sit heavily.