Sorry it has been so slow around here lately. I’ve been away on vacation for a little over a week, and before that was preparing for the trip and for finishing things up at work, so I haven’t been able to post. (My vacation photos are here if you’d like to see them - they are the Montreal and Vermont/New Hampshire sets.) Montreal was wonderful, but now things are back to normal around here and so here is another post!
Above is a copy of “Secrets of the Kitchen,” from the October 1906 issue of the Delineator magazine. I really like this little article for several reasons. For one, I find it fascinating to learn how much trouble it was to preserve things before refrigeration was common. For example, in the hint on preserving grapes, you can see that one method was to place them in glass jars, and then sprinkle enough dry bran to keep them from touching each other, then cork and seal the jar and bury in sand.
To preserve lemon juice, you were told to combine it with sugar, dissolve it, bottle it, place olive oil on top of the juice, then cork it and seal it tightly. You will find lots of other interesting information in the article above as well.
However, the reason I really was happy to come across this collection of tips was for the following recipe - Egg Plant a la Turque. As the author explains, “In the land of the Sultan this dish is known as Mussaka, Imam-Baildi, but its preparation is by no means as difficult as its name might indicate.” I think this is something I will be trying soon. It sounds delicious, and not hard to make at all. You can of course click on the image above to enlarge the article enough to read, but I have also typed the recipe for you here.
Take an egg-plant, and cut it into slices, salt them, strain them for a few minutes, dry them well with cloth, and then fry them in butter until they are of a rich brown color. Then chop some beef very fine, and with it mince carefully some parsley and half a small onion; season with pepper, salt, and butter, and stew this mixture with a few thinly sliced tomatoes until the meat is tender. Then arrange in a pie-dish, or mold, layers of egg-plant and layers of the stew alternately. Pour a little gravy, or broth into the mold, and bake in the oven for fully thirty-five minutes. When done turn the whole carefully out on a platter, or if considered preferable, it may be served direct from the dish in which it has been baked.
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