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Stuffed Egg Plant
Cut a good-sized egg plant into halves and scoop out the center, leaving a wall one-half inch in thickness. To the portion taken out, add three peeled tomatoes and chop together. Season with one teaspoonful of very finely chopped onion, one teaspoonful of salt, one-quarter of a teaspoonful of pepper, and two tablespoonfuls of fine bread crumbs. Fill the shells with the mixture, pour over each half one tablespoonful of butter, sprinkle with bread crumbs and bake three-quarters of an hour in a moderate oven.
A simple stuffed vegetable that needs only a few clarifications: the original assumes a wood or coal range and gives no yield.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" in this period is usually read as somewhere around 350-375F. Three-quarters of an hour at that heat suits a large eggplant, though the shell should be tender to the point of a knife before you take it out.
- Salt the flesh firstThe recipe skips this, but the scooped-out pulp holds a great deal of water and, in older varieties, more bitterness than modern ones. Chopping it with salt and letting it drain twenty minutes, then squeezing, keeps the filling from turning to soup in the shell.
- The pulp is raw going inNothing here is precooked, so the onion and pulp cook entirely in the oven. Sweating the onion and pulp in a little butter first gives a noticeably better result and is closer to how the dish is usually made now.
- Peeled tomatoesThree peeled tomatoes means fresh ones, dunked in boiling water and skinned. Drain them of seeds and juice or the filling will be wet. Roughly one cup of drained canned tomato substitutes.
- Bread crumbs"Fine bread crumbs" in this period usually means dry crumbs from stale bread rather than the soft fresh kind. They are doing the work of binding a wet filling, so use dry crumbs and add more if the mixture slumps.
- A tablespoon of butter eachPoured over as melted butter, not dotted. It bastes the crumb topping. Two tablespoons total for a whole eggplant is generous but not out of line for the period.
- YieldOne good-sized eggplant gives two halves, which is a light main course for two or a side for four. Let the halves rest five minutes before serving; they hold a lot of heat.
Eggplant reached American cookbooks slowly. It was grown in the South and in market gardens near the big Eastern cities through the nineteenth century, but was still novel enough that general household books tended to give it only a few treatments, usually fried in slices or stuffed like this one. The scooped-shell method is old and widespread, and is often said to have come from around the Mediterranean and the Levant wherever the vegetable is common, and it survives in American cooking largely because it solves a practical problem: eggplant flesh is spongy and bland on its own, and a shell gives it a vessel while tomato, onion and butter give it something to carry. The very restrained seasoning here, one teaspoon of onion and a quarter teaspoon of pepper for a whole eggplant, is generally taken as characteristic of turn-of-the-century American domestic cookery, which is often said to have treated garlic and strong herbs as foreign and left them out even from dishes that had come from kitchens where they were standard.