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Eggplant en Casserole
4 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 1 large eggplant 3 small onions 2 garlic cloves 3 tomatoes 1 green pepper Salt and pepper to taste Slice eggplant into thin slices, then slice onions, garlic, tomatoes and pepper quite thin. Arrange them, alternately, in a Criscoed casserole, seasoning each layer with salt and pepper. Pour in melted Crisco and Cook over slow fire or in moderate oven till the eggplant is tender. Serve hot or cold. cover.
A layered vegetable dish that behaves like a ratatouille baked rather than stewed. The text is slightly garbled at the end — the stray "cover." belongs with the cooking instruction, so the vessel is covered while it cooks.
- Oven temperature"Moderate oven" corresponds to roughly 350-375F. Allow something like 50 to 70 minutes covered for thin slices; the eggplant should collapse under a spoon rather than merely soften.
- The vesselA 1913 "casserole" is a lidded earthenware or enamelled pot that goes on the stove or in the oven, not the shallow glass dish the word now suggests. Any lidded Dutch oven or covered baking dish works; the lid matters, since the tomatoes and onions provide all the liquid.
- CriscoIn 1913 a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening; the brand is still sold, though the present formulation differs. The book exists to sell it. Four tablespoons of any neutral oil does the same job here, and olive oil suits the ingredients better. "Criscoed" simply means greased.
- Salting the eggplantPresent-day varieties are generally bred to be less bitter, so degorging for flavour is largely unnecessary. Salting the slices for 20 minutes and blotting them still pays off in texture, because it collapses the spongy flesh so it absorbs less fat.
- Garlic quantityTwo whole cloves sliced thin is mild by current taste. Sliced rather than crushed, they mellow into the layers; double them if you want the garlic to register.
- Slow fireStovetop cooking in a covered pot works but needs a heat diffuser and occasional attention — the bottom layer of tomato will scorch before the eggplant is tender otherwise. The oven is the safer route.
- Yield and servingOne large eggplant with three tomatoes serves four as a side. Served cold, as the recipe allows, it improves overnight and wants a little more salt and an acid note before it goes to the table.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a recently launched product: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a solid white fat that was neither lard nor butter and had no culinary tradition attached to it. The recipes therefore had to come from somewhere else, and this one reads as Mediterranean in character -- eggplant, tomato, onion, sweet pepper and garlic layered and baked belongs to the same family as ratatouille, Turkish şakşuka and the Balkan and Levantine dishes built on the same four vegetables, though no line of descent between them can be traced. Eggplant was still widely treated in the United States as an unfamiliar vegetable, and a book aimed at the general housewife including it at all is worth noting.