No. 2738

Eggplant Stuffed and Baked

Aubergines Farcies Gratinees

Divide some small eggplants, each one in two, without peeling them; score and fry, then drain and empty out the center with a spoon, leaving a layer a quarter of an inch thick against the peel. Chop up the parts that have been removed, adding as much soaked and well-pressed bread-crumbs, and a clove of crushed garlic; cook the preparation for a few moments, season with salt, pepper and nutmeg, and remove from the fire until it loses its greatest heat, then finish with a few raw egg-yolks and chopped parsley. Fill the interior of the halved eggplants with this, smooth the tops and range them on a baking sheet; pour over plenty of oil and cook in a slack oven. When a fine color dress them on an espagnole sauce (No. 414) reduced with tomato sauce (No. 549) and run through a fine sieve.

← No. 2737 Eggplant a la Robertson Tomatoes, Corn & Garden Vegetables No. 2739 Eggplant Fried →

For the Modern Kitchen

A straightforward stuffed eggplant, written for a kitchen where the sauces were already made and sitting in the stockpot corner. Two things need translating: the oven and the sauce.

"A slack oven"The cool end of the range, roughly 275-300F. The filling is already cooked and the yolks only need to set, so the long gentle heat is about colouring the tops and finishing the shells without the oil scorching.
Score and fry firstThe text says only to score and fry; in practice that means cutting the cut face crosshatch and frying it in a generous film of oil. This is what makes the flesh scoopable, and collapsing the flesh first is generally held to reduce how much oil it takes up afterwards.
The quarter-inch shellThe hinge of the dish. Go thinner and the shells slump on the baking sheet; leave more and you have too little flesh for the filling and a raw ring under the skin.
Soaked bread-crumbsSoft crumb rather than dried crumbs from a tin, soaked (the recipe does not say in what; milk or water both work) and wrung out hard. "As much" is best read as an equal quantity to the chopped eggplant flesh, which gives a fairly bready stuffing by modern taste; half that is defensible.
Cool before the yolks"remove from the fire until it loses its greatest heat" is there so the yolks bind rather than scramble; yolks begin to thicken around 145F, so let it drop below that. The recipe says only "a few" yolks.
Plenty of oilThe text specifies only "oil", most likely olive, poured over the smoothed tops so they gratinate. Be generous across the sheet of halves as the recipe asks.
The sauceEspagnole reduced with tomato and sieved is, in effect, a brown tomato sauce. A good reduced veal or beef stock cooked down with tomato purée and strained gets you to the same place; a plain thick tomato sauce is a reasonable everyday stand-in, though it changes the dish.
YieldThe recipe gives no quantity; two small eggplants, halved, will serve four as a vegetable course. If your eggplants are large and seedy, salt and blot them before frying.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) set down the repertoire of Delmonico's in New York, and this entry is a French rendering of a dish that belongs equally to Provence, Italy and the Levant, where stuffed eggplant halves are old and near-universal. What marks it as Ranhofer's is the finish: the vegetable is not served on its own juices but dressed on espagnole cut with tomato and passed through a sieve, which is the restaurant grammar of the period, where every plate resolved into one of a small number of mother sauces. The garlic and olive oil place it in the southern French section of his imagination; nutmeg in a savoury vegetable stuffing was still entirely ordinary in nineteenth-century professional cooking.