Skip to main content
Main

To Dress Eggplant

Eggplants are stuffed with a butter, bread, and milk mixture flavored with onion, salt, pepper, and parsley, then baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
To Dress Eggplant

Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

To Dress Eggplant

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggplant

  1. Boil the egg-plants until soft.

  2. Cut them in half lengthwise and scoop out the inside, leaving the skin whole.

Make the filling

  1. In a pot, heat the butter and onion for a few moments.

  2. Soak the bread in milk and mix it with the onion and butter.

  3. Add salt, black and red pepper, and parsley, and let it stew for 1 hour.

Bake and serve

  1. Strew grated toast over the mixture and place it on a gridiron for 30 minutes.

  2. Return the mixture to the egg-plant shells and serve.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  4. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Bread + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg-plants
Form the edible shells and bulk of the dish, becoming soft and mild when boiled.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the filling and helps carry the onion's flavour.
Bread
Soaked in milk, it binds the filling and keeps it moist and tender.
Onion
Adds savoury aroma and depth to the filling as it softens in butter.
Grated toast
Forms a dry crumb topping that helps the surface brown on the gridiron.

The step that matters

Scooping out the eggplant halves. Keep the skin whole and the shell walls intact so they can hold the filling. Tearing the skin leaves the filling with nothing to sit in, and an over-soft boil makes the halves fragile to handle.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, bread, milk, pepper, parsley. 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.

More stuffed eggplant recipes

Turkish 3 See all 156 →

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipesOatmeal BreadOatmeal Bread51 recipes