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Boiled Eggplant with Parmesan Cheese
Peel the eggplant, cut it into halves lengthwise, and scoop out the seeds; then cut them into convenient lengths, place them in a saucepan of boiling water with a lump of salt, an onion stuck with three or four cloves, and a bunch of parsley, and boil them until tender. Prepare the following sauce: Mix well one ounce of butter and one tablespoonful of flour in a stewpan over the fire; then mix in gradually one-half pint of boiling water, and stir over the fire for five minutes, then move it to the side and stir in the juice of a small lemon. When the eggplant is cooked, drain it well put it on a hot dish, with some pieces of toast underneath, pour the sauce over, and serve.
A plain boiled vegetable with a lemon-butter sauce, from an era when eggplant was still a novelty on American tables. The technique is sound but the timing and seasoning need attention.
- The missing cheeseThe title promises Parmesan, the method never mentions it. Grate a couple of tablespoons over the drained eggplant before saucing, or hand it separately at the table.
- Scooping the seedsModern eggplants tend to have fewer and smaller seeds than older varieties, and the seed mass is generally not worth removing. Peel, halve and slice into pieces of about 2 inches; if the flesh looks brown and pitted around the seeds, the fruit is old.
- Don't overboilEggplant collapses to mush quickly in water. Ten to twelve minutes at a gentle boil is usually enough for 2-inch pieces; test with a knife tip, and drain the moment it yields.
- Draining is the hingeBoiled eggplant holds an extraordinary amount of water, and any left behind will thin the sauce into a puddle on the toast. Drain in a colander, then press gently with the back of a spoon and let it sit a minute before plating.
- The court bouillonThe clove-stuck onion, parsley and salt are doing real work here, since the vegetable itself is bland. Use enough salt that the water tastes seasoned, not a token "lump."
- The sauce, in measuresOne ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; half a pint is one cup. This is a thin veloute-style sauce made on water rather than stock, so it will taste flat unless you salt it; add the lemon off the heat, as directed, so the fresh juice is not cooked away.
- StewpanAn ordinary small saucepan. Cook the butter and flour together for a minute or two before adding liquid so the sauce does not taste of raw flour.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how much eggplant to use; one large one with this quantity of sauce would serve about three or four as a side dish. The toast beneath is structural as much as anything, soaking up what the eggplant releases.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) ran to roughly nine hundred pages and functioned as much as a professional reference as a home manual, which is why it carries several eggplant preparations at a time when the vegetable was still regarded in much of America as a Mediterranean and Southern curiosity, said by tradition to have been viewed with the same suspicion once directed at the tomato. Boiling it and masking it with a butter sauce over toast is a thoroughly French hotel treatment, the same handling given to salsify, cardoons and other vegetables considered too assertive to serve plain. The Parmesan in the title without any Parmesan in the method is a curiosity of the book; Oscar was the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel rather than its chef.