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Fricasseed Mutton with Egg-Plant
Cut the required quantity of mutton into small pieces, place in a stewpan, and sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper; shake the pan over the fire until it makes a slight hissing noise; add one-fourth pound of butter and fry until the meat is nicely browned. Trim and slice four egg-plants, rub them with salt and leave them for a short time to extract the bitter taste; take the pieces of meat out of the fryingpan, keep them hot, drain the egg-plant and fry it in the remaining fat till well browned. Place the pieces of meat on a hot dish, put the fried slices of egg-plant in a circle around, and serve while very hot.
A brisk sauté rather than a true fricassee, and the original assumes a cook who already knows how much meat is going into the pan. A few things need pinning down.
- Quantities are open"The required quantity of mutton" is left to the cook, but four eggplants suggests a large service. For four people, figure 2 lb boneless shoulder cut into 1-inch pieces and one large or two medium eggplants.
- Mutton, and what to use insteadMutton means sheep over a year old, stronger and firmer than lamb, and it is rarely sold in American markets. Lamb shoulder or leg is the practical substitute; it browns and cooks faster, so watch it.
- The hissing panShaking the salted meat in a dry hot pan until it hisses drives off surface moisture so the butter fries rather than steams. Do not skip it, and do not crowd the pan or the meat will stew grey.
- A quarter pound of butterThat is one stick, and it is generous by design because the eggplant afterward drinks fat. Butter alone will brown deeply at frying heat; adding a spoonful of neutral oil keeps it from burning.
- Salting the eggplantModern cultivars are generally less bitter than older ones, and salting is often said to matter now mainly for collapsing the flesh so it absorbs less oil. Twenty to thirty minutes, then press the slices dry between towels before they go into the pan.
- Not actually a fricasseeThere is no sauce and no liquid here despite the name. If the lamb pieces are from a tougher cut and still firm after browning, they will need a covered braise with a little stock, which the recipe does not provide for.
- ServingEverything is fried in sequence in one pan, so the meat has to be held somewhere warm while the eggplant cooks; a low oven does the job. Both go cold and greasy quickly; plate and serve at once, as the original insists.
Oscar Tschirky was never the Waldorf's chef, he was its maître d'hôtel, but his 1896 cookbook collected the hotel's working repertoire alongside a great deal of ordinary American household cookery. Mutton was still a common meat in New York at the time, cheaper and more assertive than lamb, and it appears in the book in chops, stews and hashes. Eggplant was the less familiar element: grown in American gardens by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but eaten mainly in Mediterranean, Levantine and Creole kitchens. The pairing of sheep and eggplant is an old one across Turkey, Greece and the Balkans, and a dish like this one, browned in butter and ringed on a hot platter, may be that combination filtered through French service conventions.