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Fried Eggs with Eggplants
Neatly peel a small eggplant, cut it into six equal slices and place on a soup plate. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper, adding half gill cold milk; turn well in the seasoning, then in flour. Heat two tablespoons butter in a large black frying pan, lay the eggplants, one beside another, in the pan, and gently fry for three minutes on each side. Carefully crack twelve eggs over the slices. Season the eggs evenly with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper; then set the pan in the oven and bake for five minutes. Remove, carefully slide on a large, round, hot dish and serve.
A one-pan supper: floured eggplant rounds fried in butter, then twelve eggs cracked over the top and set in the oven. The original assumes you know how hot your oven is and how thick to cut the slices.
- Slice thickness is the hingeSix slices from a small eggplant come out fairly thin, on the order of 1/2 inch, though the recipe does not say. Cut them much thicker and the centres are likely to stay spongy no matter how long the eggs bake.
- Half a gill of milkA gill is half a cup, so this is 1/4 cup. It is there only to wet the slices so the flour clings; the eggplant should be damp, not swimming.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. A hot oven, 400-425F, sets the whites in roughly the five minutes stated; at 350F you will need closer to ten and the yolks will firm up.
- Doneness of the eggsFive minutes is likely to leave the whites barely set and the yolks liquid. If you want the yolks fully cooked, or are serving anyone who should avoid soft eggs, bake until the whites are opaque and the yolks no longer wobble.
- The black frying panCast iron, and it needs to be genuinely large - 12 inches or more - to hold six slices in a single layer with room for a dozen eggs. Also make sure the handle is ovenproof, since the pan goes straight from burner to oven.
- Butter and scorchingTwo tablespoons of butter in a big pan is thin cover, and butter browns fast under floured eggplant. Keep the heat at medium, or use half butter and half a neutral oil to raise the smoke point.
- Salting the eggplantModern eggplant is generally reckoned less bitter than older varieties, and in any case the salt here goes on with the milk as seasoning rather than as a purge. Small, firm, glossy specimens need no draining.
- YieldTwelve eggs and six slices serves six as a light main course, two eggs and one round each. Slide it out whole and cut between the slices at the table.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1911), a compendium built by a Delmonico's man who was fond of exactly this kind of arithmetic - six slices, twelve eggs, a teaspoon of salt to each stage. Eggplant with eggs cooked together in one pan is a form found all around the Mediterranean, from the Provencal and Italian frittata-style dishes to the Levantine and Turkish habit of breaking eggs over softened vegetables in the same pan they were cooked in; Filippini's version is the restaurant treatment, with the vegetable floured and fried in butter first so the slices keep their shape under the eggs. White pepper rather than black is often said to be a mark of the professional kitchen of the period, the traditional explanation being that no dark specks show against the whites.