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Baked Eggplant

A baked eggplant dish with butter, bread crumbs, onion, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Baked Eggplant

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. Boil the eggplant until tender.

  2. Peel and mash the eggplant in a bowl.

Assemble and bake

  1. Mix in butter, pepper, bread crumbs, boiled onion, and nutmeg if desired.

  2. Transfer the mixture to a shallow baking dish.

  3. Add plenty of butter on top and pour in the cream or milk.

  4. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for a few minutes until heated through.

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. Butter + breadtop 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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggplant
Forms the soft, moist body of the dish once boiled and mashed.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, giving a smooth texture and browning on top.
Bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and give the mash body so it holds together when baked.
Cream or rich milk
Adds moisture and richness, keeping the baked mixture tender rather than dry.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (eggplant, butter, pepper, bread, onion, cream):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against eggplant, butter, pepper, bread, onion, cream. 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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