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Stuffed Eggplant
Wash and dry six eggplant; cut off the tops without detaching, so they will serve as lids. Scoop out all the insides and season inwardly with salt and pepper. Take one medium-sized onion, peel and chop very fine and put in a saucepan with half an ounce of butter and cook for three minutes over a brisk fire, taking care not to brown it; add six chopped mushrooms and one ounce of sausage meat, season with salt and pepper and cook for three minutes longer, stirring constantly. Now put in the insides of the plant, finely chopped, one teacupful of breadcrumbs and one teaspoonful of finely-chopped parsley; mix thoroughly and cook for two minutes longer, or until the preparation commences to boil. Turn it into a basin when cold, stuff it into the eggplant skins, replace the lids, put the plant gently on a dish, cover with buttered paper and bake in a moderate oven for eighteen minutes.
A straightforward vegetable farci from Oscar's Waldorf repertoire, written for cooks who could judge doneness by eye. Two things need attention: the eggplants must be small, and eighteen minutes will not cook a large one.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" is usually taken as around 350F, though the term covered roughly 325 to 375F. The eggplants go in whole with their lids on, so heat penetrates slowly.
- The timing is for small eggplantsEighteen minutes only works with slender specimens of about 6 to 8 ounces, whose shells are thin and whose filling is already hot from the pan. Standard American globe eggplants of a pound or more need 40 to 50 minutes, covered, and the shell should give completely when pressed.
- Scooping the shellsLeave about a quarter-inch of flesh attached to the skin or the shells collapse in the dish. Salting the hollowed interiors, as directed, draws out moisture as well as seasoning; give them fifteen minutes and blot dry before filling.
- The sausage is a seasoning, not a fillingOne ounce of raw bulk sausage meat for six eggplants is a flavour note in the modern sense of a teaspoon or two per vegetable. If you want it to read as meat, use 6 to 8 ounces and brown it properly, which will also lengthen the pan-cooking step beyond three minutes.
- Sausage must cook throughThe filling is only brought to a simmer in the pan before being cooled and stuffed. Break the meat up finely and cook it until no pink remains, rather than relying on eighteen minutes inside a closed eggplant to finish it.
- A teacupfulRoughly three-quarters of a cup in period usage, though teacups varied. Add breadcrumbs by feel until the mixture holds together but is not dry; the eggplant flesh gives up a lot of water.
- Buttered paperButtered parchment, laid directly over the eggplants. It keeps the lids from scorching and traps steam. Foil works but browns the tops less; parchment is closer to the intent.
- "A brisk fire"Medium-high heat. The instruction not to brown the onion matters here, as this is a pale, delicate filling rather than a caramelised one.
- YieldSix stuffed eggplants, one per person as a first course or light supper dish, or halved lengthwise after baking to serve twelve alongside a roast.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf from its opening in 1893 and put his name to The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, a vast compendium aimed as much at ambitious home cooks as at the trade. The dish is a plain rendering of French aubergines farcies: hollow the vegetable, chop the flesh into a duxelles of onion and mushroom bound with crumbs, return it and bake. Eggplant was still a somewhat foreign vegetable in American kitchens of the 1890s, associated with Mediterranean and Creole cooking, and its appearance in a hotel book of this scale reflects how thoroughly French technique governed grand-hotel menus of the period. The stub of sausage meat and the handful of mushrooms may reflect professional kitchen economy, though the recipe itself says nothing of where they came from.