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Stuffed Egg Plant

A baked dish of eggplant halves filled with a buttered, seasoned mash of eggplant flesh, optionally topped with cheese, almonds, and breadcrumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Eggplant and almond share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Stuffed Egg Plant

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 filling

  1. Boil the eggplant until tender.

  2. Cut the eggplant in half and remove the insides, then mash them.

  3. Season the mashed eggplant with butter, pepper, and salt.

  4. If desired, add grated cheese or finely chopped almonds.

Bake and serve

  1. Spoon the mixture back into the eggplant shells.

  2. Top with buttered breadcrumbs.

  3. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until browned.

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. Eggplant + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together28 recipes

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

  2. Eggplant + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,123 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

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

  4. Butter + almondtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together9,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Pepper + cheesetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,861 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggplant
Forms the body of the dish, and its soft flesh becomes the creamy filling.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture to the mashed filling and helps the top brown.
Breadcrumbs
Form a crisp, golden topping as they brown in the oven.

The step that matters

Bake until browned. Baking long enough lets the buttered breadcrumbs toast and the surface brown, which gives the dish its color and crisp texture. Underbaking leaves the topping pale and the filling warm but not set through.

Swap the almond

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

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Walnutfits better
  3. Chickpeafits better
  4. Almondthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against eggplant, butter, pepper, cheese. 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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