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October 25
Menu: Wild Duck with Mushrooms; Stuffed Egg Plant; Apple and Cucumber Salad; Almond Pudding; Coffee; Hot Cheese Denises Stuffed Egg Plant-Parboil 1 egg plant and cut in halves. Scrape out some of the inside and chop some cold cooked meat with 2 tomatoes, 1 onion, and 2 green peppers. Then mix with 1 beaten egg, 1 tablespoon Crisco, and salt and pepper to taste. Fill halves with this mixture; sprinkle with breadcrumbs and tiny bits of Crisco, put in baking dish with little stock or water, and bake.
The text under this heading is a stuffed eggplant recipe, followed by two stray menu lines from the day's dinner calendar. It is a leftovers dish, written in the compressed style of the book's daily menus, and it leaves out both oven temperature and time.
- Oven and timingNo temperature is given. Bake at 375F for 30 to 40 minutes, until the filling is set and the crumbs are browned. The eggplant shells are already parboiled, so the bake is mainly about cooking the egg and heating through.
- ParboilingSimmer the whole eggplant 8 to 10 minutes before halving, just until a knife meets little resistance at the shoulder. Any longer and the shells collapse when you scrape them; leave a wall about half an inch thick.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it, so it appears in both filling and topping. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works: 1 tablespoon of butter or oil in the mixture, and small dots of butter over the crumbs.
- Cold cooked meatThis is a leftovers dish. Roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups chopped cooked beef, lamb, veal or chicken suits one medium eggplant. It must be meat that was cooked and refrigerated properly; the short bake will not rescue anything doubtful.
- Green peppersIn 1913 American usage these are unripe sweet bell peppers, not chilies. Two is a lot of raw pepper for one eggplant — soften them with the onion in a little fat first, or the filling stays crunchy and watery.
- Tomatoes and moistureSeed the tomatoes and drain the scraped eggplant pulp, or the egg will not bind. The "little stock or water" in the dish is there to keep the bottoms from scorching — a quarter inch is plenty.
- YieldOne eggplant, halved, serves two as a main course or four alongside other dishes, which is how the book's menus use it.
- The stray menu lines"Mock Pigeon, Espagnole Sauce" and "Scalloped Pumpkin and Rice" belong to the October 26 menu, not to this recipe. The asterisk on "Scalloped Pumpkin and Rice" marks an item for which the book gives a recipe.
The Story of Crisco was published in 1913 by Procter & Gamble, two years after the company introduced its hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, and the recipes were compiled by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. The "Calendar of Dinners" section gives a full menu for every day of the year, which is why this page runs a recipe straight into the next day's bill of fare with no break — the book was meant to be read as a planning tool, not browsed dish by dish. Stuffed eggplant itself is far older than the shortening: the technique of hollowing and refilling the fruit is generally traced to Ottoman and wider Mediterranean cooking, and it reached American cookbooks through the nineteenth century as eggplant moved from a curiosity to a market-garden staple. Its appearance here in late October, packed with cold roast meat, shows the other purpose these menus served: using up what was already in the icebox.