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Baked Eggplant

Baked eggplant with butter, parsley, pepper, salt, lemon juice, bread crumbs, optional fried onion.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. 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 the eggplant

  1. Peel the eggplants and cut them into large dice.

  2. Simmer the diced eggplants in boiling water for 10 to 15 minutes.

  3. Drain in a colander and press out any remaining juice.

Assemble and bake

  1. Mix in chopped parsley, pepper, salt, lemon juice or vinegar, and butter until absorbed.

  2. Optional: Add grated and fried onion to the mixture before baking.

  3. Pour the mixture into a buttered pudding dish.

  4. Cover with bread crumbs and dot with butter.

  5. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Eggplant + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together328 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Eggplants
Forms the soft, bulk body of the dish once simmered and pressed.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the eggplant and browns the crumb topping.
Bread crumbs
Forms a crisp, golden topping that contrasts with the soft eggplant.
Lemon juice or vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich eggplant.

The step that matters

Press out the eggplant juice. Eggplant holds a lot of water. If juice is not pressed out after simmering, the dish will be watery and the topping may turn soggy instead of crisp in the oven.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against eggplant, butter, parsley, pepper, lemon, bread. 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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