Kitchen Detail: Many Eggplants, 2 Recipes

Pasta Alla Norma as depicted in Katie Parla’s book Food of the Italian Islands.

By Nancy Pollard

After owning one of the best cooking stores in the US for 47 years—La Cuisine: The Cook’s Resource in Alexandria, Virginia—Nancy Pollard writes Kitchen Detail, a blog about food in all its aspects—recipes, film, books, travel, superior sources, and food-related issues.

Eggplants growing at Twin Springs Fruit Farm in Orrtanna, Pennsylvania, as shown on their website.

NO ONE MAKES jokes about the abundance of eggplants the way zucchini gets mauled with memes and pranks. The eggplant’s origins are in China and it owes its introduction to the West to Spanish explorers in the 16th century. Eggplant is called aubergine in France as well as in Germany. Even the British  shamelessly copied the name from their competition across the Channel, as they have with the vegetable courgette, which we call zucchini (plural of zucchino—only in Italy it is a zucchina with a plural of zucchine). The Italians and the Spanish feel no allegiance  to the word aubergine from their French neighbors and insist on calling it melanzana (Italy) or berenjena (Spain). And a little research tells us that when the first examples arrived in the US, the resulting vegetables were indeed egg-shaped and in some instances white; hence the term eggplant was adopted. Eggplants were viewed with suspicion as they, like tomatoes and potatoes, are members of the Nightshade family. But now, as we have literally piles of them at our farmers markets, I thought I would share two of my current favorite recipes.

The Pure Goddess of Pasta

One is from Katie Parla’s 2023 cookbook, Food of the Italian Islands, from which I already shared her delish puff-pastry recipe for Cipolline Catanesi. I had tried making Pasta Alla Norma, which also has its roots in the Sicilian region of Catania, from another video and an earlier cookbook. But the recipes had too many components and both tries turned out a bit stodgy, like  my initial trial with Spaghetti Alla Carbonara. But Katie Parla’s version is terrific and easy, with the four sacred ingredients—eggplant, tomatoes, basil, and ricotta salata (not counting some garlic and  extra-virgin olive oil).  Legend has it that its name is a reference to the perfection of Vincenzo Bellini’s opera Norma, uttered by the writer Nino Martoglio when he first tasted it at the home of Signora Saridda:

Chista e’ ‘na vera Norma — This is a true Norma.

If you have the skinny elongated eggplants, slicing them like thin cucumber slices, but unpeeled, makes a nice presentation. But with the larger eggplants, Katie Parla’s recipe calls for unpeeled ones cut into small cubes. Sautéing them correctly in extra-virgin olive oil makes quite a difference. Do not skip over the step of checking the temperature of your frying oil. You don’t want it to dip into the low 300F (150C) range or above the 360F (180C) frying range. You want the cubes to be be lightly browned with golden touches, not dark brown. And you don’t want the oil so low that the eggplant absorbs oil before getting a bit crispy, and Parla advises you to  only wipe out the pan before the next step. Her advice to crush the tomatoes by hand does indeed give a nifty texture to the sauce, different than if you had roughly chopped them with a knife. You can listen to “Casta Diva” as sung by Maria Callas or Renee Fleming while you make this simple but sublime dish.

My second eggplant recipe really is not a recipe as my Italian son-in-law would say, rather a “procedure”—that is, making eggplant into french fries. You can follow the procedure found in a few cookbooks and on the internet, which is dipping them in flour, then egg and then bread crumbs, but I think that over-complicates it. If the eggplant is young, I don’t salt it for hours and then rinse and dry it. I peel the eggplant and then cut it into ¼-inch (.65cm) slices, then into “french fry” strips. I wrap the strips in a towel to absorb some moisture.  For 2 to 3 eggplants, 1 cup of all-purpose flour is plenty. Salt the flour and add ½ to 1 teaspoon of either thyme or cumin. A few grinds of fresh pepper is nice too. Heat your oil—I use a base of sunflower seed oil mixed with some generic olive oil, or duck fat. Dredge your eggplant strips in the flour in batches and shake them in a strainer or colander, to get rid of the excess flour. Once your oil hits 360F (180C), you are ready to fry your eggplant strips. Each batch should take only a couple of minutes, as you turn the strips over in the hot oil until they are a deep gold color. Allow them to drain some of the oil on either a clean cloth towel or paper towels, but serve immediately. Sometimes I will sprinkle some finely chopped summer herbs into the fries. Any yogurt-based dip makes an unusual cool sauce to go with these irresistible fries.