Home › Vegetables › Egg Plant, Fried
Egg Plant, Fried
Some two hours before dinner-time peel the plant and slice it quite thin, sprinkle each slice with salt, lay slice upon slice and place a plate upon the top. The salt will draw out the disagreeably bitter flavor. Half an hour before serving wipe each slice dry, dip in beaten egg, then in cracker dust or bread crumbs, and fry each in plenty of hot fat. Lay a piece of soft brown wrapping paper in a colander; and upon it place the slices as they come crisp and brown from the frying-pan, keeping the whole hot. The paper will absorb the oil left by the frying. Serve on a hot platter, the slices overlapping each other.
A straightforward salt-and-fry method that still works, with two details worth updating: the draining paper and the thickness of the slices.
- Slice thickness"Quite thin" here means about 1/4 inch. Thinner slices go leathery in hot fat; much thicker and the interior stays raw before the crumb coat colors.
- Salting timeTwo hours is generous but not wasted — it collapses the spongy cells so the slices absorb far less fat. Thirty to forty-five minutes gives most of the benefit if you are pressed.
- On the bitternessModern eggplant varieties are bred with much of the bitterness out, so salting is now mostly about texture and oil absorption rather than flavor. Do not skip it on that account.
- Wipe, don't rinseBlot the slices thoroughly dry with a towel. Any surface moisture will make the egg wash slide off and will spit in the fat.
- Cracker dustFinely rolled plain soda crackers. These are usually salted, so go easy on any extra salt in the crumbs given the salting step above.
- Brown wrapping paperDo not use it. Modern kraft paper and grocery bags may carry recycled inks, adhesives and coatings not meant for hot food. A rack set over a sheet pan drains better anyway, and paper towels are the direct substitute.
- Fat and temperatureThe book gives no temperature. "Plenty of hot fat" indicates shallow frying; in practice something in the region of 350-365F works, with the crumbs soaking below that and darkening above it. Expect roughly two to three minutes a side.
- Holding hotKeep finished slices in a 200F oven on the rack rather than stacked, which steams the crust. Fry in batches so the fat temperature does not crash.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity. As a rough guide, one medium eggplant of about 1 lb will serve three or four as a side dish.
Eggplant was a latecomer to American tables — long grown as an ornamental curiosity before it was widely eaten, and nineteenth-century cookbooks often felt obliged to explain what to do with it at all. Frying it in egg and crumbs was a common treatment in English-language books of the period, and the insistence on salting reflects older varieties that really were bitter. The detail about brown wrapping paper in a colander is a good marker of the period: before commercial paper towels, cooks drained fried food on whatever absorbent paper the household had on hand, and butcher's or grocer's wrapping was an obvious candidate. The Butterick book, published by a pattern company for a broad domestic readership around the turn of the century, is exactly the sort of volume that would spell out such household economies alongside the cooking.