Home › The World's Kitchen › Mussaka, Moldave
Mussaka, Moldave
Remove bones, trim fat off the boiled beef saved from yesterday's dinner, then cut meat in small square pieces, and cut half the quantity of cold boiled potatoes into same shape. Finely chop a good-sized white onion, place in saucepan with a tablespoon melted butter and fry for five minutes or until a nice light golden colour. Add beef and potatoes, pour in one gill broth and two gills pure tomato juice, season with teaspoon salt, half teaspoon each pepper and curry powder, saltspoon grated nutmeg, mix well and cover pan. Cook on range for five minutes, then set in oven for forty-five minutes, remove and keep hot.
Cut three small eggplants in halves lengthwise and scoop out all the interior as near the skin as you can without cutting it. Lightly butter insides of shells, sprinkle a little salt over, place on a tin and set in oven for ten minutes. Remove, divide hash evenly in the six half-shells, neatly smooth surface, sprinkle a little bread crumbs over and arrange a few little bits of butter on top. Set in oven for twenty minutes, remove, place on a hot dish, pour one gill tomato sauce around and serve.
A leftovers dish built on cold boiled beef, so the seasoning and the moisture level do all the work. Nothing here is difficult, but the measurements are pre-metric and the oven temperature is never named.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so the filling takes 1/2 cup broth and 1 cup tomato juice, with another 1/2 cup of tomato sauce poured round at the end. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe never names an oven heat; a moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading for the 45-minute braise, the 10 minutes for the shells and the 20-minute final bake.
- The beefThis is written for meat left from a boiled dinner; the recipe does not say which cut. Any well-cooked, gently braised beef works; roast beef is drier and will want an extra splash of broth. Cut it in small squares, as the recipe says, not shreds, so the filling holds its shape.
- Proportions'Half the quantity' of potato is not specified as weight or volume; either reading gives about twice as much beef as potato, enough to fill six half-shells.
- Salting the shellsThe ten minutes in the oven after buttering and salting starts the shells cooking and dries the cut surface; it is worth keeping, especially with large eggplants.
- ScoopingThe recipe says to scoop as near the skin as you can without cutting through; leave enough flesh that the shell holds together in the second baking. The scooped flesh is not used here - dice and fry it, or save it for another dish.
- Curry powderHalf a teaspoon of curry powder here is a period seasoning touch rather than anything Indian in intent. Blends vary widely, so start with a scant half teaspoon and taste after the braise.
- Tomato juice'Pure tomato juice' most likely meant strained fresh or bottled tomato, unseasoned. Much canned tomato juice today is salted, so hold back some of the teaspoon of salt until you have tasted.
- YieldThree eggplants give six filled halves.
Moussaka runs the length of the old Ottoman world, from the Levant through the Balkans, and the name is generally traced to Arabic musaqqa'a, meaning something chilled or moistened. The version most people know now - eggplant layered with lamb under a béchamel - is usually dated to twentieth-century Greece, later than this book; earlier moussakas were simply eggplant and minced meat baked together, which is closer to what is written here. Calling it "Moldave" points to Moldavia. Hollowing a vegetable, drying the shell in the oven and refilling it with a bound hash is a familiar treatment in cookbooks of this period, applied to eggplant, tomato, marrow and onion.