Home › Vegetables › Fried Egg-Plants
Fried Egg-Plants
(Melanzane fritte) Egg-plant or, as they are also called, mad-apples are an excellent vegetable which may be used as dressing or as a dish by itself. Small or middle-sized egg-plants are to be preferred, as } the big ones have sometimes a slightly bitter taste.
Remove the skin, cut into cubes, salt and leave them in a plate for a few hours. Then wipe them to remove the juice that they have thrown out, dip in flour and fry in oil. 101
A three-line method that depends almost entirely on the salting step. Read it as a technique rather than a formula, since no quantities are given at all.
- YieldTwo medium eggplants (about 1.5 lb total) will serve four as a side dish. Figure roughly half a cup of flour and enough oil for shallow frying, an inch or so in the pan.
- The salting is the hinge"A few hours" is longer than most cooks now bother with, but it is doing the real work: drawing out water so the cubes brown instead of steaming, and collapsing the spongy interior so it absorbs less oil. Thirty to sixty minutes in a colander with about a teaspoon of salt per pound is enough with modern varieties; do not skip it entirely.
- "Mad-apples"An old English rendering of the Italian melanzana, which was read as mela insana, "unhealthy apple." Nothing about the plant requires caution; the name is a false etymology.
- Bitterness in big onesThe warning held more strongly when this book was written than it does now. Commercial eggplant has largely been bred away from bitterness, so a large globe eggplant is usually fine, though small or slender ones still have thinner skin and fewer developed seeds.
- PeelingThe instruction to remove the skin suits cubes that will be fried soft and used as a dressing or garnish. If you want the pieces to hold their shape, leave the skin on.
- Wiping, not rinsingWipe the cubes dry with a towel as written. Rinsing puts back the water you spent hours removing, and the flour will not adhere to a wet surface.
- Oil and temperatureOlive oil is implied and would be the usual choice in a southern Italian kitchen of the period; a mild one or any neutral oil works. Bring it to about 350-365F and fry in batches so the pan does not cool, four to five minutes per batch until the cubes are deep gold.
- Flour onlyNo egg, no breadcrumbs. The flour coat should be a thin dusting, shaken off well, and the cubes go into the oil straight away or the coating turns pasty.
Eggplant reached Italy through Arab trade and Mediterranean Spain and was long treated with suspicion in northern Europe, a suspicion preserved in the English "mad-apple" that this recipe still records. In Italy it was thoroughly domesticated by the nineteenth century, particularly in the south and in Jewish Roman cooking, where fried eggplant is a fixture. The note that fried eggplant may serve "as dressing or as a dish by itself" reflects how vegetables functioned in Italian home cooking of the period: the same panful might be folded into pasta, laid over meat, or eaten plain, rather than belonging to one fixed dish. Salting eggplant before frying is often said to have been common in Italian and French kitchens well before this book, and the reason given here for preferring small fruit is one cooks are traditionally supposed to have given, before breeding largely removed the bitterness.