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Oriental Vegetables
Peel one small, sound eggplant, one Spanish onion and two fresh red tomatoes. Trim and thoroughly wash twelve fresh okras. Cut the eggplant, tomatoes and okras in half-inch pieces, place them in a bowl. Finely chop the onion and brown it with a teaspoon of butter in frying pan for five minutes, then add the other vegetables, season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon curry and three saltspoons black pepper, thoroughly mix them, then place in a lightly buttered baking dish, sprinkle two tablespoons fresh bread crumbs over them, place an ounce of butter in little bits on top, set in moderate oven for one hour. Remove and send to table in the same dish.
A vegetable casserole of eggplant, okra, tomato and onion, lightly curried and crumb-topped. The measurements are old-style but the method is sound; the main adjustment is time.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is three-quarters of a teaspoon of black pepper. That is assertive but not unreasonable against a full teaspoon of salt; start with half if you are cautious.
- Moderate oven350F. The dish is covered only by crumbs, so a hotter oven will scorch the top long before the eggplant collapses.
- The hour is generousCut in half-inch dice, and with the onion already browned, the vegetables should be tender well before the hour is up. Check at 40 to 50 minutes; the eggplant should be soft and the liquid mostly reduced. A full hour suits a deep, crowded dish.
- Spanish onionA large sweet yellow onion, roughly 3/4 to 1 lb. One is enough for the whole dish; if yours is small, use two.
- CurryIn American kitchens of this era "curry" on an ingredient line usually meant a ready-made commercial curry powder rather than a freshly toasted masala. Half a teaspoon here is a background note, not a flavor lead.
- Okra and sliminessTrim the caps but do not cut into the pods more than the half-inch slices require, and pat them dry before they meet the pan. The recipe moves the vegetables to the baking dish as soon as they are mixed; a few extra minutes of open-pan heat first will help keep the mucilage from turning the casserole ropy.
- Butter quantitiesA teaspoon for the onion is scant; a tablespoon browns it better without changing the dish. The ounce dotted on top is two tablespoons, and it is what makes the crumbs work.
- YieldOne small eggplant and a dozen okra pods gives a side dish for four. It reheats well and is arguably better the next day.
"Oriental" in an American cookbook of this period was a loose label covering everything from Istanbul to Bombay, and eggplant or curry powder were often enough to earn it. The dish itself belongs to a family of Mediterranean and Levantine vegetable bakes — the Turkish and Balkan türlü, the Provençal ratatouille, the Egyptian bamia (though bamia is as often made with meat) — in which summer vegetables are stewed or baked together. Okra reached American kitchens through the Atlantic slave trade and was long treated as a Southern vegetable. The instruction to "send to table in the same dish" is characteristic of cookbook writing in a professional service idiom.