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Fricasseed Egg Plant

A creamy eggplant dish simmered with butter, flour, milk, and egg yolks.

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

Fricasseed Egg Plant

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the eggplant

  1. Peel and slice the eggplants.

  2. Boil the eggplant slices in water with salt until thoroughly cooked.

  3. Drain the water and pour in enough milk to cover the slices.

Make the sauce

  1. Add a few bits of butter rolled in flour and let it simmer gently.

  2. Shake the pan over the heat until the sauce thickens.

  3. Stir in the beaten yolks of 2 or 3 eggs just before serving.

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. 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Eggplants
Form the body of the dish, becoming soft and tender when boiled and simmered.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid that gently thickens into the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the sauce and helps give it a smooth texture.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when rolled with butter and heated in the milk.
Egg yolks
Enrich and thicken the sauce, adding body and a silky texture.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolks just before serving. Egg yolks set and can curdle or scramble if overheated, so they should be added off the heat or at the very end, once the sauce has thickened, and kept warm rather than boiling.

Swap the eggplant

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

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

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