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Egg Plant (Peel and slice one or two)
Peel and slice one or two medium-sized egg-plants, put on in cold water, boil till tender, drain, mash fine, season with salt and pepper, and add a beaten egg and a table-spoon of flour; fry in little cakes in butter or butter and lard in equal parts; or cut in slices, lay in cold well-salted water for an hour or two, roll in egg and cracker crumbs, and fry with a little butter. Parsnips and salsify or oyster; plant may be cooked in the same way, but the oyster-plant is made in smaller cakes to imitate oysters.
Two methods in one entry: mashed eggplant fritters, and the more familiar egg-and-crumb fried slices. Both hinge on getting water out of a vegetable that is mostly water.
- Drain harder than it saysBoiled eggplant holds an enormous amount of water, and "drain, mash fine" will not give you a batter that holds together. Press the cooked pulp in a colander or twist it in a clean towel until it stops weeping, then mash.
- The flour is a minimum, not a maximumOne tablespoon of flour to one or two eggplants is barely enough to bind. Add flour a spoonful at a time until the mixture just holds a shape on the spoon; too much and the cakes turn pasty.
- Salting the slicesThe hour or two in "cold well-salted water" is the period's version of degorging. Modern eggplant is bred far less bitter, so this step is now about seasoning and firming the flesh; 30 minutes in salted water, or dry-salting for 30 minutes and blotting, does the same work.
- Cracker crumbsSoda or common crackers, crushed fine — closest current equivalent is unsalted saltines or plain water crackers, pulsed to coarse crumbs. They brown faster than dry breadcrumbs, so keep the pan at a steady medium rather than high heat.
- Butter and lardThe recipe's butter-and-lard mixture keeps the butter from scorching at frying heat, since butter alone burns. Any neutral oil cut with a spoonful of butter for flavour serves the same purpose; keep the fat at about 350F for the crumbed slices.
- Salsify, the oyster-plantSalsify and its relative scorzonera are still sold at farmers' markets in autumn and winter. Peel under acidulated water — the roots discolour within minutes — and expect them to cook softer and milder than parsnip.
- YieldTwo medium eggplants make roughly a dozen small cakes, enough for four as a side dish. Fry in batches and hold in a 200F oven rather than crowding the pan.
The Dixie Cook-Book appeared in the 1880s, part of a wave of compiled regional cookbooks assembled from contributed household receipts, and this entry is characteristic of the genre: one paragraph doing the work of four recipes, with the reader trusted to fill in the gaps. Eggplant grew well in the heat of the American South. The closing note about salsify is worth reading twice: "oyster-plant" was the common name for the root because its cooked flavour was thought to resemble oysters, and the cakes were shaped small "to imitate oysters." The technique — boil, mash, bind with egg and a little flour, fry in cakes — is what lets the recipe hand off from eggplant to parsnip to salsify in a single sentence.