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Eggplant

Eggplant slices are battered in flour, milk, eggs, and salt, then fried until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Eggplant

Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Eggplant

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare the eggplant and cut it into thin slices.

  2. Soak the slices in salt water for 2 hours.

  3. Dry the slices on a napkin.

Make and fry

  1. In a bowl, make a thin batter by mixing milk, flour, eggs, and salt.

  2. Roll each slice in the batter and fry in butter until golden brown.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Eggplant + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together371 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Eggplant
Forms the tender main body of the dish once sliced and fried.
Eggs
Bind the batter and help it set and hold onto the slices.
Flour
Thickens the milk and eggs into a batter that coats each slice.
Milk
Thins the flour and eggs into a pourable batter that browns when fried.
Butter
Fries the battered slices, adding richness and helping them turn golden brown.

The step that matters

Fry until golden brown. The batter sets and browns in hot fat. If the butter is too cool, the coating soaks up grease and turns soggy, while the eggplant inside may stay underdone.

Swap the eggplant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, flour, milk, butter):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Eggplantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, milk, butter. 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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