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Broiled Eggplant
Peel an eggplant and cut it into six slices half an inch thick; put them in a dish and season with salt and pepper and pour over one tablespoonful of sweet oil. Mix well, arrange the slices on a broiler and broil for five minutes on each side. Remove them from the fire, place on a hot dish, spread over a gill of maitre d'hotel sauce, and serve.
A short recipe that depends almost entirely on two things the original leaves unexplained: the gill of maître d'hôtel and the heat of the broiler.
- A gillHalf a cup, which is a generous amount for six slices. Maitre d'hotel is usually a compound butter -- softened butter worked with chopped parsley and lemon juice, seasoned -- though the recipe here calls it a sauce; check the book's own entry for which form is meant. If it is the butter, it can be made ahead and kept cold in a log.
- Sweet oilOlive oil, called sweet to distinguish it from rancid or from mineral and lamp oils. One tablespoon for six half-inch slices is barely enough; eggplant drinks oil, and two to three tablespoons brushed on both faces is closer to what the cooking needs.
- The broilerThe wording ('on a broiler', 'remove them from the fire') points to a hinged wire broiler or gridiron over live coals, turned once, with direct radiant heat from below. Under a modern overhead broiler set high, put the rack about four inches from the element and expect roughly the same five minutes a side, watching for the surface to blister and brown.
- Salt does double dutyThe seasoning step also draws moisture, so give the salted slices ten to fifteen minutes in the dish before broiling rather than going straight to the fire. Blot the beads of liquid off, or the slices steam instead of charring.
- Judge by give, not by clockFive minutes a side assumes a fierce fire. The slices are done when the flesh is collapsed and creamy through to the middle; underdone eggplant is spongy and faintly bitter, and no amount of butter covers it.
- Modern eggplantToday's globe eggplant is generally reckoned less bitter than nineteenth-century stock, so long degorging is probably unnecessary. The recipe says to peel, but the peel is worth leaving on if the fruit is young, as it holds the slice together on the grate.
- YieldSix slices serves three as a vegetable course, or two as a light supper dish with bread to catch the butter.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the Waldorf's kitchen at a moment when eggplant was still a slightly foreign vegetable on American tables — grown widely in the South and among Italian immigrant households, but appearing in hotel menus mainly fried, stuffed, or, as here, broiled and finished with a French butter. Maître d'hôtel butter is the workhorse garnish of nineteenth-century restaurant cooking: parsley, lemon and butter, laid on grilled steaks, fish and vegetables alike, and its presence here is the tell that this is hotel food rather than home food. The name is often said to come from the dining-room post of the maître d'hôtel, though the derivation is traditional rather than documented. That a plain broiled vegetable earned a place in the Waldorf's repertoire is itself worth noting alongside the heavily sauced dishes of the period.