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Stuffed Eggplant
I eggplant
½ cup water
2 tablespoons butter
2 cups crums
Salt and pepper
Cut the eggplant in half lengthwise and scoop out the center pulp, leaving the rind about one-half inch thick so that the shape may be firm. Cover the shells with cold water. Chop the pulp fine, season it with salt and pepper, add butter or other savory fat and cook in a frying-pan for ten minutes, stirring well, then add water and one cup of bread-crums. Drain the shells, sprinkle the interior of each with salt and pepper and fill them with the mixture. Spread one cup of crums on the surface of the mixture, place the two pieces of plant in a baking-dish or deep pan, and pour enough hot water into the pan to come one-third up the sides of the plant. Bake one hour, and serve hot.
A plain baked stuffed eggplant of the kind that appears in nearly every American cookbook of the 1900s and 1910s. The original gives no oven temperature and assumes a cook who knows what a filled shell should look like going in.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe uses no oven term at all. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern equivalent for the hour specified; the water in the pan helps keep the shells from scorching.
- "Crums"Soft bread crumbs from the inside of a stale loaf, not dry packaged crumbs, which will absorb the half cup of water and turn to paste. Two cups of soft crumbs is roughly two to three slices of bread torn up.
- Cover the shells with cold waterThe recipe says only to cover them and drain them later. It keeps the cut surfaces from browning while you cook the filling; period cooks also believed soaking drew off bitterness, though that is usually credited to salting rather than plain water. Drain and pat dry before filling.
- Leave the rind half an inch thickScoop thinner and the shell collapses in the oven. A grapefruit spoon or a small paring knife run round the inside edge first makes it easy.
- Ten minutes in the panThe chopped pulp should go from wet and spongy to soft and slightly browned, with most of the moisture driven off. If it is still watery when the crumbs go in, the filling will be sodden.
- Butter or other savory fatThe period phrase covers bacon fat, drippings or olive oil. Any of them works; olive oil suits eggplant best.
- The water bathHot water one-third up the sides steams the shells while the top browns. Top it up if the pan runs dry before the hour is out.
- Timing and yieldAn hour is generous for a modern eggplant; check at 40 minutes and take it out when the shell yields to a knife and the crumb top is brown. Two halves serve two as a main dish or four as a side.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper only, as written, is austere. A little onion cooked with the pulp, or grated cheese in the top crumbs, is consistent with the era and much improves it.
Eggplant was still slightly exotic in American home cooking when the Butterick book appeared — treated in mainstream cookbooks as a vegetable needing explanation. Stuffing and baking a scooped-out shell was one common approach, and it belongs to a family of dishes that use the vegetable as its own container; the same logic produces stuffed marrow, stuffed peppers and stuffed tomatoes, all of which sit near this recipe in period vegetable chapters. The heavy hand with bread crumbs is characteristic of the time: crumbs stretched an expensive vegetable, absorbed fat, and gave the browned top that signalled a finished dish. Butterick, a pattern company, published its household books for the same audience that bought its dress patterns — women running a household on a careful budget, who wanted a reliable method rather than a flourish.