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Mashed Eggplant
Place in a dish a large onion cut in slices; add two green peppers also cut in slices, squeeze over the juice of a sweet lime and soak for several hours. Put into a quick oven a couple of fine young eggplants and roast them; take them out when done, open and scoop out as much of the inside as possible. Put this into a basin; add one teaspoonful each of salt, mustard and oil and work the whole to a pulp, casting out all the lumps. Then add the onions and peppers and as much of the lime juice as required. After mixing thoroughly, the preparation is ready for use.
Eggpant, Poulette Style Peel the eggplant, cut it in halves, remove the seeds and cut it into small pieces. Put a large lump of butter in a stewpan to melt, put in the pieces of eggplant, toss them about for a few minutes, season to taste with salt and pepper and pour over them a small quantity of clear broth. Let them stew over a gentle fire until quite cooked, then move the stewpan to the side of the fire and stir in a moderate quantity of finely-minced parsley, with the yolk of an egg that has been beaten up with the juice of half lemon and strained. Lay the pieces of eggplant on a hot dish, pour the sauce over them, and serve.
Two dishes are run together here: a cold roasted-eggplant mash in the Levantine manner, and a small stew finished with an egg-yolk liaison. Both are straightforward once a few of Oscar's assumptions are unpacked.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400-450F by the usual reading of the term. Whole eggplants take something like 40-50 minutes at that heat, until the skins collapse and the flesh is slack. A little charring on the outside is desirable, not a fault.
- Sweet limeCitrus limetta, the low-acid lime once sold in American markets and still common in India and the Middle East. It is barely sour. An ordinary Persian lime is far sharper, so add its juice in stages and taste, which is what the recipe means by "as much of the lime juice as required."
- MustardMost likely a teaspoon of dry mustard powder rather than prepared condiment; prepared mustard would bring vinegar and turmeric with it.
- The onion soakThe several hours in citrus is the point of the first dish. It takes the raw bite off the onion and pepper so they can go in uncooked. Do not shorten it.
- Draining the pulpRoasted eggplant carries a lot of water. Let the scooped flesh sit in a strainer for ten minutes before working it, or the mash will be soupy no matter how much oil goes in.
- Poulette: the hingeOnce the beaten yolk and lemon go in, the pan must stay off direct heat. Above roughly 180F the yolk curdles and the sauce breaks into grains. Pull the stewpan aside, stir, and serve at once.
- "A large lump of butter" and "clear broth"Read these as roughly 3 tablespoons butter and a scant half cup of light chicken or veal stock for the single eggplant this second recipe names. The liquid should barely cover the bottom of the pan; the eggplant releases plenty of its own.
- SeedsYoung eggplants have negligible seeds; the poulette recipe's instruction to remove them suggests larger fruit. With a large supermarket globe eggplant, cutting out the seedy core is worth doing for texture.
- YieldNone is given. The mash will serve roughly four to six as a spread with bread or toast; the poulette dish about four as a vegetable course.
The first of these is recognizably baba ghanoush or one of its many cousins, a roasted-eggplant mash of the eastern Mediterranean and Levant. Oscar Tschirky gives it no name and no origin, which was normal practice in his 1896 book: dishes arrived at the Waldorf through cooks, guests and travel, and were written down as procedures rather than as cultural artifacts. The second recipe is French to its bones. À la poulette means a velvety sauce thickened with egg yolk and sharpened with lemon, often said to be named for its pale color, though the name is also commonly linked to the sauce's use with poultry, and it was applied in the period to mussels, sweetbreads, tripe and vegetables alike. Setting the two side by side on one page is a fair picture of the Waldorf kitchen's repertoire, where classical French method was the working language and everything else was translated into it.