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Stuffed Eggplant
2 tablespoons butter tablespoon onion 1 egg Seasoning Cook eggplant 15 minutes in enough boiling salted water to cover. Cut a slice from top and with a spoon remove pulp, taking care not to work too close to skin. Chop pulp, add soft stale bread crumbs. Melt butfer, add finely-chopped onion, and cook 5 minutes. Add to chopped pulp and bread, season with pepper and salt, and, if necessary, moisten with a little water. Cook 5 minutes, cool slightly, and add 1 beaten egg. Refill shell with mixture and bake 25 minutes in a hot oven.
Cooked rice or macaroni may be substituted for crumbs. meat may be added.
The ingredient list has come through incomplete — the eggplant itself and the bread crumbs never got their quantities — but the method is clear enough to work from. Assume one large eggplant and about a cup of crumbs.
- "A hot oven"Read this as 400–425F. Twenty-five minutes at that heat browns the top and heats the filling through; the shell is already tender from its time in the water.
- The 15-minute boilThis is the hinge. The eggplant goes into boiling salted water whole and comes out just soft enough to scoop, with the skin intact as a serving vessel. Take it much further and the shell collapses when you spoon out the pulp. Test with a skewer at 12 minutes.
- Leave a wall"Taking care not to work too close to skin" is unquantified; in practice leaving something like a quarter-inch of flesh attached works. A bare skin tears and slumps in the oven.
- Bitterness and saltOlder eggplant varieties are generally held to have been more bitter, and modern cultivars rarely need degorging. Whatever the case, season the filling assertively: boiled eggplant pulp is bland on its own.
- Moistening"If necessary, moisten with a little water" is doing real work. Stale crumbs drink up the pulp's liquid; the mixture should be soft and spoonable, not stiff, or it bakes dry. Stock or milk does the job better than water.
- The eggCool the filling before beating in the egg, as directed — added to a hot pan it scrambles and the mixture turns grainy rather than setting into a light body.
- The variationsCooked rice or macaroni stand in for the crumbs in the same role, as a bulk absorbent; the recipe gives no quantity for either. "Meat may be added" means cooked leftovers, chopped and folded in with the pulp, in whatever amount is on hand.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; one large eggplant will serve about two as a main course or four as a side. The recipe cuts a slice from the top, but halving the eggplant lengthwise before boiling gives two shallower shells that fill and bake more evenly.
Stuffed eggplant — the pulp scooped, seasoned, bound and returned to its own skin — is a long-established treatment of the vegetable across the Mediterranean and the Middle East, well before it appeared in American cookbooks in any quantity. Eggplant was slow to be taken up in the English-speaking kitchen, and early American references often call it "guinea squash" or treat it as a Southern curiosity. By the time this book was compiled it was being handled the way a household cook handled most vegetables: boiled first, extended with stale bread, bound with an egg, and browned. The closing lines — rice or macaroni for the crumbs, meat if there is any — show a recipe written to absorb whatever was left in the larder rather than to be followed exactly.