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Eggplant and Tomato, Athenienne
Peel a small eggplant, then cut into six even slices. Neatly trim all around, season with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper and lightly roll them in flour. Heat a tablespoon lard in a frying pan, arrange the eggplant slices one beside another in the pan, and fry for three minutes on each side. Remove and place on a lightly buttered tin. Place in a mortar two skinned, raw sausages, half a teaspoon each chopped parsley and chives, half bean chopped garlic, two tablespoons bread crumbs, half gill cream, one egg yolk, two saltspoons salt, one saltspoon cayenne and a saltspoon grated nutmeg, then pound the whole well together to a smooth paste and evenly spread over the six slices eggplant. Cut three medium, red tomatoes into halves crosswise. Evenly season the cut part with a half teaspoon each salt and sugar and two saltspoons white pepper, then arrange a piece of tomato on top of each eggplant, cut side downward. Spread a half teaspoon melted butter over the tomatoes, evenly divided, place in the oven to bake for twenty minutes, remove, dress on a hot dish and serve.
A straightforward gratin of fried eggplant, sausage forcemeat and roasted tomato, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen around 1900. A few of the measures and one unstated oven temperature need translating.
- Saltspoons and gillsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon. A gill is half a cup, making the half gill of cream a scant quarter cup.
- The oven temperatureNo heat is given. A moderate oven, 350–375°F, is right here: the sausage paste needs to cook through while the tomato softens without collapsing.
- "Half bean chopped garlic""bean" turns up as an informal measure for garlic in kitchen writing of this period, meaning a very small amount, roughly half a small clove. It is genuinely imprecise; treat it as a quarter to half teaspoon minced and adjust to taste.
- Cook the sausage throughThe forcemeat is raw pork bound with egg yolk. Spread thin over six slices it should reach 160°F within the twenty minutes, but check with a thermometer rather than trusting the clock, particularly if you spread it thickly.
- Skinned raw sausagesTwo links of plain fresh pork sausage, casings slipped off; call it roughly 4 to 6 oz of meat depending on the size of the links. Modern breakfast sausage is usually already seasoned with sage and pepper, so taste before adding the full salt and cayenne.
- Mortar or food processorThe pounding is there to make a smooth, homogeneous paste that will not fall apart on the eggplant. A few pulses in a food processor does the same work; stop before the fat smears and the mixture turns greasy.
- Salting the eggplantThe recipe salts and flours the slices immediately. If your eggplant is large or seedy, salting the trimmed slices for twenty minutes and blotting them dry first will draw out bitterness and cut how much fat they absorb in the pan.
- LardOne tablespoon of lard for six slices is optimistic — eggplant drinks fat. Use lard if you have it for the flavour, or olive oil, and add more as the pan goes dry.
- YieldSix assembled slices: a first course or light supper for three, or a side for six.
The International Cook Book (1906) was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it ranges widely over the national dishes of Europe as a professional kitchen of the period understood them -- which is to say filtered through French technique. "Athenienne" is a garnish name in that idiom rather than a dish anyone in Athens would have recognised by that title; in French kitchen usage of the period, Greek attributions tended to attach to preparations built on eggplant, tomato, garlic and oil. What the recipe does record is a Mediterranean habit of pairing fried eggplant with a meat stuffing and a tomato cap, a form echoed in dishes from Greek papoutsakia to Turkish and Balkan patlican preparations.