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Eggplant, Saute Minute
Peel a medium, sound egg plant and cut it in thin slices, season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, turn well in seasoning and lightly roll in flour. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in large frying pan, place slices one beside another in pan and fry briskly for one minute on each side, dress on a dish, squeeze juice of half a sound lemon over, sprinkle a little finely chopped parsley over all and serve.
A one-pan side that lives or dies on heat and thinness. The instruction that matters most is the word briskly: the pan must be hot enough that a minute a side is genuinely enough.
- Slice thin"Thin slices" here means about 1/4 inch or less; the recipe does not say whether to cut rounds or lengthwise planks. Anything thicker will not cook through in the two minutes the recipe allows and will turn spongy in the middle.
- Salt does double dutyThe teaspoon of salt is seasoning, but if you let the salted slices sit ten minutes before flouring, the salt also draws out moisture, which helps them brown rather than steam. Blot them dry, then flour, if you do this.
- A tablespoon of fat is optimisticEggplant absorbs fat greedily and a single tablespoon will vanish under the first batch. Expect to add butter, or a mix of butter and oil, between batches; the oil also keeps the butter from burning at the heat required.
- Work in batches"One beside another" means a single uncrowded layer. Crowding drops the pan temperature and you get pale, oily slices instead of browned ones. Two or three batches for one eggplant is normal.
- Half a teaspoon of pepperThat is a lot by modern palates for one vegetable. Start with a quarter teaspoon and adjust at the table.
- TimingOne minute a side works only in a properly preheated heavy pan over medium-high heat. Judge by colour: golden and set, not browned to a crust.
- YieldOne medium eggplant serves three or four as a side. Serve immediately; the slices go limp within a few minutes of dressing with lemon.
Eggplant reached European kitchens by way of the Arab Mediterranean and was long treated with suspicion in the north, where it was grown as a curiosity before it was eaten as a vegetable; its old English name, mad-apple, is often said to record that unease, though the "insane apple" sense appears to be a later gloss on Italian melanzana, itself a reshaping of Arabic badhinjan. By the time this book was compiled, the fruit was familiar enough in American markets that a cookbook could call for "a medium, sound egg plant" without further explanation. The treatment here looks more like French restaurant practice than Mediterranean home cooking: saute minute is kitchen shorthand for a dish thrown together to order in a hot pan, and the finish of lemon juice and chopped parsley is the standard a la meuniere dressing usually given to fish, applied to a vegetable instead.