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French Fried Egg Plant, Summer Squash or Cucumber
Wash, but do not peel the egg plant. Cut in crosswise slices one-third-inch thick, dust with salt and pepper, roll in flour, egg and crumbs as in French Fried onions and fry as directed. Peel squash and cucumbers and prepare the same way.
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A compact cross-reference recipe: the whole method lives in the French Fried Onions entry it points back to, which means deep frying in fat hot enough to set the crumb before the vegetable steams. A few things need spelling out.
- Fat temperature"Fry as directed" sends the cook back to the French Fried Onions entry; no temperature is given here. By modern practice deep fat for this work runs around 375F: much below that and the breading absorbs oil and slides off the eggplant, much above and the crumbs brown before the interior softens. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- The breading orderThe book's sequence is flour, then beaten egg, then crumbs, in that order. The flour is what gives the egg something to cling to on a wet-surfaced vegetable; skipping it is the usual reason coating falls away in the fat.
- Salting the eggplantThe recipe dusts with salt and moves straight on. Eggplant sold today is generally reckoned less bitter than older varieties, so drawing out juices is optional, but 20 minutes under salt then a firm blot still gives a drier slice that fries cleaner.
- Leaving the skin onThe recipe says not to peel the eggplant but to peel squash and cucumber; it does not say why. In practice the skin does help hold the one-third-inch round together in the fat.
- CucumberFrying cucumber has largely fallen out of practice. It is wetter than eggplant, so salt and drain it well; the recipe asks for the same one-third-inch slice, and the centre will come out soft, almost custardy.
- Crumbs"Crumbs" in this period means dried fine white breadcrumbs, not panko and not the seasoned canned sort. Dry crumbs from stale bread, sieved, are what the texture was built around.
- Draining and timingTwo to three minutes a batch is usually enough for a third-inch slice. Drain on a rack rather than on paper so the underside does not steam, and salt again the moment it comes out.
- YieldThe recipe gives none. A medium eggplant will yield somewhere between a dozen and eighteen slices at this thickness, enough for four as a side. Fried vegetables of this kind do not hold; serve them as they come out of the pan.
Deep-fried breaded vegetables belong to the era when the American home kitchen acquired a reliable kettle of fat, judged by a bread cube or by the first wisp of smoke, and cookbooks of the early twentieth century treat "French fried" as a technique to be learned once and applied to everything — onions, potatoes, eggplant, squash, oysters, croquettes. Hence the structure of this entry, which is less a recipe than a note appended to the master method a few pages earlier. Eggplant itself was still a somewhat suspect vegetable in Anglo-American cooking, long grown as an ornamental, and its culinary use here is often said to have come by way of Southern and Mediterranean immigrant tables, though the route is hard to trace with confidence; frying it in crumbs was one of the surest ways to make it acceptable to a household that did not otherwise know what to do with it. The inclusion of cucumber is the period detail that stands out most now, a reminder that it was treated as a cooking vegetable, stewed and fried, as readily as a salad one.