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Fried Eggplant
Select a nice large eggplant, peel it, remove the seeds and cut it into pieces about one and one-half inches long and three-fourths of an inch wide. Put these on a plate, sprinkle them well with salt, and leave for an hour or two. Afterward put them on a cloth, twist it round and wring it well to extract as much juice as possible from the plant, but do not squeeze the pieces hard enough to break them. Sprinkle them over with flour, seeing that each piece is well covered, and place them in a frying-basket. Put a large lump of fat in a stewpan, and when boiling put it in the basket. As each piece of plant is nicely browned take it out of the basket, sprinkle it lightly with salt, and lay it on a sheet of paper in front of the fire for a minute or two, to drain as free from fat as possible. Spread a napkin over a hot dish, lay the eggplant on it, and serve.
A straightforward deep-fry, but two of its instructions belong to an era of bitter, seedy eggplants and open hearths. The salting and wringing step is the hinge: it collapses the spongy cells so the pieces brown instead of drinking oil.
- Fat "boiling"Fat does not truly boil at frying temperatures; the wording means the point at which it shimmers and a crumb sizzles briskly. Aim for around 365-375F, and fry in batches so the temperature does not crash.
- The wringingAfter an hour under salt the pieces will be limp and weeping. Twisting them in a cloth matters here; skipping it tends to give a greasier result. A firm but gentle press between towels achieves much the same thing with fewer casualties.
- Removing the seedsWorth doing with an old, heavy, pale-seeded eggplant. Supermarket globe eggplants are picked young and the seed cores are small and tender; unless the seeds are visibly brown, leave them and simply trim the pieces to size.
- Salt twice, judiciouslyThe pieces absorb some of the degorging salt, and Oscar salts again after frying. Rinse briefly and dry thoroughly after the wringing step if you are salt-sensitive, then season lightly at the end.
- Flour coatingFlour clings only to a damp surface, so dredge immediately after wringing. A frying basket will shed loose flour into the fat and darken it; a spider or slotted spoon gives more control and lets you turn the pieces.
- "In front of the fire"This is a warming station, not a cooking step. A wire rack set over a sheet pan in a 200F oven does the same job and keeps the undersides crisp, which paper alone will not.
- Size and yieldOne large eggplant, cut to the dimensions given, will serve roughly four as a side, though the recipe states no yield. The pieces are batons rather than rounds, which fry faster and give more crisp surface per bite.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, and his 1896 book records the kind of vegetable cookery a large hotel kitchen turned out by the plateful: peeled, degorged, floured, dropped in deep fat and sent up under a folded napkin. Eggplant is often said to have reached American tables largely through Mediterranean and Creole cooking, and nineteenth-century varieties had a reputation for bitterness that made salting standard advice rather than optional; modern varieties are generally reckoned to be less bitter, though the technique survives because it also improves texture. The napkin-lined dish is a period marker in itself, a common if not universal service convention for fried food, meant to absorb the last of the fat between kitchen and table.