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Fried Egg Plant

A fried eggplant dish with salted slices coated in egg and flour, cooked in lard and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Fried Egg Plant

Why it works: Eggplant and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 371 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Fried Egg Plant

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and slice the eggplant.

  2. Sprinkle each slice with coarse sea salt and let them stand for about 1 hour with a weight on top.

Bread and fry

  1. Dip the salted slices into the beaten egg, then coat with flour.

  2. Fry in a mixture of lard and butter until light 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. Eggplant + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together371 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Eggplant + buttertop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together507 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 main body of the dish, cooking down tender inside the crisp coating.
Egg
Binds the flour coating to the slices so it adheres during frying.
Flour
Forms a coating that browns and crisps in the hot fat.
Lard and butter
Fat for frying that conducts heat and browns the coating.

The step that matters

Salting and resting the slices. Salt draws moisture out of the eggplant over the hour, so the slices absorb less oil and the coating stays crisper during frying.

Swap the eggplant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, flour, 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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