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Stuffed Eggplant
(A Turkish recipe.) Cut off the tops of 2 small eggplants, chop the inside with as much calf's liver and bread-crumbs, herbs, egg, and a little salt and pepper. Fill, add crumbs and butter, bake 1/2 hour.
A terse nineteenth-century note that assumes the cook knows how a stuffed vegetable works. The proportions are left entirely to judgement, so the notes below fill in the gaps rather than change the dish.
- No oven temperature is givenA moderate oven, around 350-375F, is the usual modern equivalent, though the book supplies no term to translate. Small eggplants filled with a raw meat stuffing may need longer than the stated half hour; the filling should reach 160F and the shells should collapse slightly when pressed.
- "Chop the inside"Hollow the eggplants from the cut top, leaving a shell about a quarter inch thick. The recipe mixes the scooped flesh in raw; cooking it down first with the other filling ingredients is a modern precaution against its weeping water into the stuffing.
- Quantities are unstatedQuantities are unstated by weight, but the recipe does give a ratio: 'as much calf's liver' as chopped eggplant flesh, with crumbs, herbs and egg. For two small eggplants that works out at roughly 8 oz liver, a cup of fresh crumbs and one egg -- a working proportion rather than a conversion.
- Calf's liverStill sold at good butchers, though beef or lamb liver is more common now and is stronger in flavour. Trim the membrane and any tubes, and chop rather than grind: minced liver turns pasty when baked.
- Sweat the liver firstBrowning the chopped liver briefly in butter with the eggplant flesh before mixing in crumbs and egg drives off moisture and keeps the finished stuffing from being grey and wet. The recipe itself does not call for it.
- "Herbs"Unspecified, as was usual. For a Turkish-leaning dish, flat-leaf parsley with dill or mint is closer to the mark than the mixed sweet herbs an English or American cook of the period would have reached for.
- Salting the shellsModern varieties are generally less bitter than older ones, so salting is less necessary for flavour than it once was. Thirty minutes of salting still firms the flesh and is usually said to reduce how much butter it absorbs.
- Crumbs and butter on topDot generously. If the topping is colouring faster than the filling sets, cover it for part of the baking and uncover to brown at the end; the recipe says nothing either way.
- YieldTwo small eggplants, filled whole, serve two as a main course or four as a side.
Stuffed eggplant belongs to the vast family of dishes the Ottoman kitchen built around the vegetable, where hollowed and filled preparations are grouped under the word dolma, from a verb meaning to be filled. Meat-filled versions were served hot as a course in themselves. The compression here is telling: no oven temperature, no quantities, no explanation of what a Turkish cook would actually have done with the shells. It records a dish encountered rather than a dish long practised, and calf's liver stands in for whatever the original filling may have been tif original there was one.