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Stuffed Eggplant
3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 3 small eggplants ½ cupful breadcrumbs 1½ cupfuls stock 1/2 cupful chopped cooked chicken or veal 1 egg Salt, pepper, and nutmeg to taste ½ cupful white wine Criscoed crumbs 1 tablespoonful flour 1 tablespoonful sherry Cut eggplants in halves and scoop out inside, leaving shell half inch thick. Soak 1/2 cupful breadcrumbs in 1/2 cupful stock ten minutes, then add cooked chicken, 2 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco, egg, well beaten, and seasoning of salt, pepper and nutmeg. Divide this forcemeat into eggplants, sprinkle Criscoed crumbs on top, set them in greased pan, pour. in rest of stock and white wine and bake half hour in moderate oven. Serve on hot dish with following sauce.
Put 1 tablespoonful Crisco and 1 tablespoonful flour into saucepan saucep and blend over fire, add sherry and 1 cupful liquor from pan in which they were baked, and cook five minutes.
Sufficient for three eggplants.
A French-style aubergine farcie rewritten to sell shortening. The proportions are printed carelessly, so read the method rather than the ingredient list.
- The measurementsThe ingredient list gives ½ cupful breadcrumbs and ½ cupful white wine, and those figures match the method. Half the crumbs' worth is soaked in ½ cupful of the stock for the stuffing, with additional Criscoed crumbs for the topping; the remaining cupful of stock goes into the pan with the wine, and about a cupful of that pan liquor makes the sauce.
- CriscoSolid hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold, though reformulated in the 2000s to cut trans fats. Butter or olive oil works better here and is more in keeping with the dish.
- Criscoed crumbsDry breadcrumbs tossed with just enough melted shortening to coat, so they brown rather than scorch. Roughly 1/2 cup crumbs to 1 tablespoon fat.
- Moderate oven350F. Half an hour is enough only if the eggplant shells are thin and the filling is already cooked meat; check that a knife goes through the shell easily before serving.
- Salt the shellsThe recipe skips it. Salting the hollowed halves for 20 minutes and blotting them dry draws out water that would otherwise dilute the pan liquid and leave the shells slack.
- MeatHalf a cup of cooked chicken or veal for three eggplants is a thin ratio by modern taste; a cup is better, and the scooped-out eggplant flesh, chopped and sauteed, belongs in the forcemeat rather than the bin.
- The sauceA roux thinned with pan liquor. If the pan liquid has reduced to almost nothing, top it up with stock rather than more wine, or the five-minute cook will not soften the sherry's edge.
- YieldThree eggplants cut in half give six portions as a side dish, three as a light main.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, which had introduced Crisco in 1911 as a shortening made from hydrogenated cottonseed oil. The book's job was to prove the new fat could do everything lard and butter did, which is why the product name appears five times in a single stuffed-vegetable recipe, including the coined verb "Criscoed." The dish itself is much older than the product: stuffed eggplant halves bound with soaked bread, an egg and a little minced cooked meat are common in French and Italian household cookery, and the sherry-finished pan gravy places this version in the genteel Anglo-American register that P&G was courting. Eggplant was still a comparatively unfamiliar vegetable in much of the United States at the time, and turns up in period cookbooks chiefly fried in slices or stuffed like this one.