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Eggplant, Saute, Aux Fines Herbes
Remove the stem and neatly peel a medium, sound eggplant. Cut it into four even quarters, then into pieces quarter of an inch thick. Heat in a black frying pan two light tablespoons melted butter and add the eggplant. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper and fry for fifteen minutes, being careful to toss quite frequently meanwhile. Mix together half teaspoon finely chopped parsley with quarter teaspoon chopped chervil and quarter teaspoon chopped chives, and sprinkle it equally over the eggplants; gently toss a little longer. Dress on a hot vegetable dish and serve.
A plain sauté that lives or dies on heat management: eggplant drinks fat instantly, and two tablespoons of butter in a wide pan will vanish before the slices have colored. Keep the pan hot and the pieces moving rather than reaching for more butter.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon of white pepper. That is assertive by current taste for one medium eggplant; start with half of it.
- The black frying panAlmost certainly a heavy iron pan, seasoned and heated properly before the butter goes in. Such a pan holds temperature when the cold eggplant hits it, which is a practical advantage here, though the recipe gives no reason for the choice.
- Fat, and the temptation to add moreEggplant behaves like a sponge for the first few minutes and then releases much of what it took up as its cells collapse. Adding butter early gives you a greasy dish; hold the two tablespoons, keep the heat at medium-high, and let the slices brown.
- Cut sizeQuartering the peeled eggplant and then slicing a quarter inch thick gives wedge-shaped pieces rather than rounds. They cook evenly and toss without breaking, though the recipe does not say why the cut was chosen.
- Fifteen minutesReasonable for cast iron over medium-high heat, but judge by the eggplant: it is done when the pieces are browned at the edges and give no resistance at the center. Undercooked eggplant is squeaky and unpleasant.
- Fines herbesParsley, chervil and chives here; tarragon, the fourth of the classical quartet, is simply not called for. They go in at the very end because the delicate ones, chervil especially, lose their aroma to sustained heat.
- If you cannot find chervilIt is anise-scented and mild, and no single herb replaces it. A little extra parsley with a few tarragon leaves comes closest; skipping it entirely is better than substituting something assertive.
- Salting the eggplantNot called for here, and modern varieties are generally reckoned less bitter than older ones. Salting for half an hour and blotting dry still helps the slices brown and absorb less fat, if you have the time.
- YieldOne medium eggplant serves two to three as a side dish.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) reflects a chef trained to French method writing for American households. Aux fines herbes is a technical instruction rather than a flourish: the phrase denotes a specific set of soft, fine-leaved herbs, chopped small and added off the heat, in contrast to more robust herbs that can be cooked in from the start. Eggplant was still relatively unfamiliar on the Northern Anglo-American middle-class table of the period, and better known in Italian, Creole and Levantine kitchens. Filippini offers no reassurance about it; he simply gives it the treatment a French kitchen would give any vegetable, and lets the herbs do the work at the end.