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Scallop of Eggplant
Chop the remnants of fried eggplant rather Arrange in ramekins in alternate layers with well-buttered cracker-crumbs, finishing with the crumbs. Pour enough milk over so that it can just be seen, and brown in a hot oven. dish resembles oysters in taste.
The text has come through with some words lost — the eggplant should be chopped "rather fine," and the last line reads "This dish resembles oysters in taste." What survives is a straightforward crumb scallop that depends entirely on already-fried eggplant.
- Hot oven"A hot oven" in books of this period is usually reckoned at roughly 400–450°F. The dish is already cooked through, so it needs only long enough to set the milk and brown the top — on the order of 12 to 15 minutes, high in the oven.
- The hinge: the milkPour milk only until it can "just be seen" between the layers, roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons per ramekin. More than that and the crumbs slump into porridge; the point is a barely-bound scallop with a crisp lid.
- Well-buttered cracker-crumbsCrush plain soda crackers to coarse crumbs and toss them with melted butter until evenly coated — about 1 tablespoon butter to a half cup of crumbs. Unbuttered crumbs brown patchily and are apt to scorch before the dish sets.
- "Scallop" and ramekinsHere scallop means the baked crumb layering, not shellfish and not a specific vessel. Any shallow ovenproof dish works; individual ramekins simply give more browned surface per serving.
- Salt and seasoningThe recipe assumes the fried eggplant was seasoned when it was first cooked. Taste the chopped eggplant before assembling and correct with salt and pepper — crackers and butter will not carry an underseasoned base.
- YieldAbout two cups of chopped cooked eggplant fills four small ramekins as a side dish, or two as a light supper course.
- If the eggplant was fried in batterBatter-fried slices bring their own starch and will thicken the milk further. Use the smaller amount of milk and expect a denser result.
Left-over cookery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often leaned on the crumb scallop: anything cooked once could be chopped, layered with buttered cracker-crumbs, moistened, and browned again into something that read as a fresh dish. The closing note that it "resembles oysters in taste" belongs to a whole family of period mock-oyster preparations: there was an "oyster plant," and corn and eggplant were pressed into oyster service at one time or another. The comparison flattered the cook twice over, since real oysters were cheap enough in American cities to be a familiar reference point but still counted as a proper dish, and a fried-crumb scallop shares their soft interior and browned edge. Eggplant itself was still faintly exotic in American home cooking of the era, and was often met peeled, sliced, salted and fried, which is exactly the leftover this recipe assumes you have on hand.