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Stewed Egg-Plants
(Melanzane in umido) Remove the skin, cut them into cubes and place on the fire with a piece of butter. When this is all absorbed, complete the cooking with tomato sauce (No. 12). 102
A four-line recipe of the kind that assumes the cook already knows what a stewed vegetable should look like. The only real decisions are heat and moisture.
- QuantitiesNone are given. Two medium globe eggplants (about 2 lb) with 3 tablespoons butter and 1 to 1½ cups tomato sauce serves four as a side dish. Scale the butter generously — the cubes drink it fast.
- "Place on the fire"Medium heat in a wide sauté pan or shallow saucepan, uncovered at first. Crowding the cubes in a deep narrow pot steams them into mush before any browning happens.
- The hinge: let the butter be absorbed, then keep goingThe instruction "when this is all absorbed" is the whole technique. Eggplant soaks up fat within a minute or two, then appears dry; if you add liquid at that point you get pale, spongy cubes. Keep it moving over the heat until the flesh collapses slightly and takes color, and only then add the sauce.
- SaltingNot mentioned, and modern cultivars are bred against bitterness, so it is optional. Half an hour of salting in a colander does firm the cut surfaces and reduces how much butter disappears in the first minute.
- Sauce No. 12The recipe sends you to Gentile's own numbered tomato sauce rather than describing one here. Any simple passata-based sauce stands in; a heavily seasoned jarred marinara will bury the eggplant.
- Finishing timeOnce the sauce is in, 10 to 15 minutes covered over low heat is enough for the cubes to turn silky. Salt and pepper are not listed but are wanted; the sauce alone will not season the vegetable.
- ServingGood warm rather than hot, and better still at room temperature the next day, when the flesh has taken up the tomato. Basil torn in at the end is a reasonable liberty.
Melanzane in umido — literally eggplant "in the damp," the standard Italian phrase for anything stewed in liquid — is the sort of everyday vegetable dish that fills the back half of Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919). The book was published in New York for an English-reading audience. The recipe's brevity, and its cross-reference to a numbered tomato sauce, reflect the Italian domestic tradition Gentile was drawing on, where a handful of base preparations are made in quantity and then carried through dozens of dishes. Butter rather than olive oil as the cooking fat is often taken as a northern signature — toward Emilia, Lombardy and the Veneto — though by 1919 an American cook would simply have used whatever was in the kitchen.