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Eggplant Oriental
2 green peppers
6 ripe tomatoes
2 eggplants
3 teaspoons salt
3 tablespoons cooking oil
1 teaspoon paprika
Remove the seeds from the peppers, and cut the peppers into small pieces. Pare the eggplants and cut into small pieces. Cook the eggplant and peppers in the fat until slightly brown, then add the tomatoes and seasonings and continue the cooking until the eggplant is done. Serve very hot.
A straightforward stewed vegetable dish that needs almost no translation, though the salt and the fat both want adjusting for modern taste and modern eggplant.
- Cut the saltThree teaspoons for two eggplants and six tomatoes is heavy by current standards, and the vegetables release a lot of liquid that concentrates as it cooks. Start with one teaspoon and correct at the end.
- More fat than three tablespoonsEggplant is a sponge and will absorb the oil immediately, leaving the pan dry within a minute. Either add oil in stages as you brown, or accept that the pieces will be pale until the tomato juice loosens them.
- "Cooking oil" and "the fat"The recipe uses the two terms interchangeably, which suggests either a bland vegetable oil or rendered fat would have been acceptable. Olive oil suits the flavors here.
- Prepare the tomatoesThe original gives no instruction for the tomatoes beyond adding them; peel and chop them. Blanch and slip the skins, or use a 28 oz can of whole tomatoes broken up, juice and all, if the ripe fruit is out of season.
- Salting the eggplantOlder varieties are often said to have been bitter enough to want drawing with salt first, though this recipe does not call for it. Modern cultivars are less bitter, so peeling and cubing is enough — which matters here given the salt already in the ingredient list.
- Timing"Until the eggplant is done" is the only guidance given; expect something in the range of 25 to 40 minutes of gentle simmering once the tomatoes go in. The cubes should collapse when pressed and the liquid should reduce to a thick sauce rather than a soup.
- YieldTwo eggplants and six tomatoes makes a generous side for six or so, though the recipe directs that it be served very hot.
The dish belongs to the family of vegetable stews found around the Mediterranean rim — eggplant, sweet pepper, tomato and oil cooked down together, the same combination that appears as ratatouille in Provence, as caponata in Sicily and in any number of Levantine and Balkan preparations. "Oriental" in an American cookbook of this period could gesture at the eastern Mediterranean and the Ottoman lands as readily as at East Asia, and the paprika in the ingredient list may point that way. Eggplant was still a relatively unfamiliar vegetable in many American kitchens at the turn of the century, and its appearance in a mass-market household manual suggests it had become buyable and cookable rather than exotic.