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Stuffed Egg Plant

A baked dish of eggplants filled with a breadcrumb and herb mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Eggplant and nutmeg share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Stuffed Egg Plant

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Parboil the eggplants to remove bitterness.

  2. Slit each eggplant down the side and extract the seeds.

Stuff and bake

  1. In a bowl, mix the bread crumbs, butter, herbs, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and egg yolk.

  2. Fill the cavity of each eggplant with the stuffing.

  3. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until tender.

Serve

  1. Serve with a gravy poured into the dish.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Eggplant + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together53 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Eggplant + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,123 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggplants
Form the edible shell that holds the stuffing and becomes soft and tender when baked.
Bread crumbs
Absorb butter and moisture to give the stuffing body and a light, crumbly texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and helping the crumbs brown lightly in the oven.
Beaten egg yolk
Binds the stuffing together and helps it set slightly as it bakes.

The step that matters

Parboil the eggplants. Eggplant flesh can taste bitter, and parboiling softens it and draws out some of the bitter compounds before stuffing. Skipping or shortening this step leaves the dish harsher and the flesh firmer when baked.

Swap the eggplant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, pepper, nutmeg, egg):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Eggplantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, pepper, nutmeg, egg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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