An ode to the aubergine
A Sicilian caponata
Serves: 4-6
Takes: Up to 30 minutes preparation time, plus 1 hour passive cooking time
Ingredients
light cooking oil
3 medium aubergine (550-600 g)
3 small to medium red onions (200 g)
5 celery stalks (400 g)
1 kg tomatoes
3 cloves garlic
30 g drained capers
50 g sultanas
olive oil
1 T pomegranate molasses
1 T tomato paste
80 ml red wine vinegar
1 T maple syrup or sugar
salt and pepper
20 g almonds
small bunch flat parsley, or basil
Method
Chop aubergine into large pieces (around 2 cm). Shallow fry in a frying pan on a low to medium heat for 10-15 minutes until well cooked, using sufficient cooking oil to ensure it does not stick. It may be best to do this in batches. Once finished cooking, place in a bowl and cover with a plate or similar so it continues to steam.
Meanwhile, chop celery and onion into similar sized chunks. Place these in a large, heavy-bottomed pan with small amount of cooking oil and the capers. Cook on a medium heat for around 10 minutes. Add chopped garlic.
Chop tomatoes similarly into large chunks, removing the hard core.
To the celery and onion pan, add tomatoes, aubergine, 1 T tomato paste, 1 T pomegranate molasses, 80 ml red wine vinegar, 1 T maple syrup or sugar, and 50 g sultanas. Place lid on and leave to simmer on low for up to 1 hour, until tomatoes have collapsed. Adjust vinegar, sugar and seasoning to taste. Allow to cool to room temperature.
Slice the almonds into slivers, toast quickly in the aubergine pan.
Serve at room temperature, topped with roasted almond slivers, chopped parsley and good olive oil, with crusty bread. Leftovers will keep for at least a week in a sterilised jar in the fridge.
The story behind the recipe…
It was a New Zealand summer in the early 2000’s. We were seventeen, eighteen, we were grown-up. Sunburnt shoulders, summer jobs, cut-off jean shorts, bikini tops. Scribe’s “Dreaming” was playing on repeat on our car radios: “I got a dream, holding on, I can’t let go cos I’ve gotta make it come true.” That was our mantra. Thirteen years of school was a lifetime and now it was over. We had dreams and most of us we were getting out of that small town so we could make them come true. But first we’d planned a last summer trip to the beach. Camping alone, tasting the freedom that was almost ours. We drove in convoy to the campsite. Cars packed with tents and sleeping bags we’d borrowed from our parents, with chilly bins and firestarters, whooping as we drove through the still, green hills, the old pine trees.
I’d brought aubergine for the barbecue, slicing them into thick slices at home, dousing each raw slice with lemon pepper and olive oil, packing them tightly in plastic containers. On the first evening, as we lit the barbecues, out came my aubergine. The boys had taken charge of cooking the meat, while I claimed small corner of the barbecue for myself. But to my surprise, everyone wanted to try. They were a novelty. The idea that those strange, rubbery purple vegetables could be turned into something soft and melting, with black edges where the skin had charred. As if the aubergine became something to aspire to, representing some shimmering, antipasti-filled future that we could only squint our eyes at.
We ate at wooden picnic tables, until we couldn’t eat anything more. We drank cheap beers, and drank some more. The night turned dark and we ran down narrow paths to the black beach, swimming naked in the moonlight, the eroding cliffs lit up against the sky, tracing with our fingers across the pale streak of the milky way. Nothing between us and Australia except ocean. Nothing between us and freedom except a few more weeks.
When cooked properly, aubergine is a joy. The creamy texture is somehow still dense and robust, its ability to soak up any flavours you ask of it. It can be anything from a smoky babaghanoush to a robust parmigiana. It is so incredibly diverse and it is integral to so many recipes I love. I know some people loathe it, even when cooked properly (and when not cooked properly it is horrendous). Is it something to do with the slippery, silken texture of it? If this is you, please avert your eyes. But if you too are an aubergine lover, or at least aubergine-curious, welcome my friend.
I played with a lot of different recipe ideas for the aubergine newsletter, many of them Italian-themed. My partner makes a really wonderful melanzana. For an Italian, saying we’re having melanzana for dinner is a bit of a joke, since melanzana is just the Italian word for aubergine. Of course what I mean is a melanzana al forno con salsa di pomodoro, which surely translates to mean something like an aubergine fornicating with a tomato, topped with grilled mozzarella. We eat it regularly, on rice, with basil leaves strewn across it. This is to say nothing of the other cuisines that make eggplant a staple, Indian (eggplant bharta) and Middle Eastern (hello Ottolenghi) chief among them, Turkish as well. But the word caponata has been stuck in my head for a month or three, ever since we ate it as an excellent cold starter at our local Italian restaurant. So caponata it is.
Caponata is a Sicilian dish, although some writers suggest it can be traced back to the Catalan region of Spain. The Catalan word caponada, which translates as “tied together with vines” is said to be a reference to the tomato base. Alternatively, the word could come from the fish capone (or lampuga), which was an expensive luxury for which aubergine was regularly substituted. Others have suggested that the word comes from the Latin, caupone, which means tavern. Caponata, preserved with red wine vinegar and sugar, was the type of dish that sailors could eat for weeks when no other vegetables would last the voyage.
Whatever the origin, caponata reflects the many different influences that shaped the Sicilian cuisine we know today. The Moors occupied Sicily, which was strategically located, from around the 9th century, bringing with them the aubergine as well as the sweet-sour sauce. But Sicilian cooking was also influenced by its many other occupiers, as Ben Tish details in his wonderful book Sicilia, including the Romans, Spaniards, French, Visigoth Greeks, and the Berbers. Sicily is closer to Tunisia than it is to Rome, closer to Libya than it is to Milan, with France to the West, and Greece with its olives to the East. It is truly a melting pot of cuisines, one in which vegetables play an important role. Tish describes the cuisine of Lampedusa, off the coast of Sicily, in terms that make my vegetarian heart swoon:
“Meat is almost non-existent and in dishes where you might expect meat you are likely to find aubergine or squashes, usually swathed in sweet and sour sauces.”
Dishes swathed in sweet and sour sauces, dishes like caponata. It’s something I make every now and then, but I’ve always seen it as a bit of a store-cupboard go-to, easy to rustle up quickly as long as there’s a can of tomatoes and a couple of fresh aubergine kicking around at the bottom of the fridge. Good enough, but I’m not sure I’ve ever truly nailed it, I’ve always rushed it. Well, if there was ever a time to learn how to do it properly, this newsletter was it. So I spent a slow Sunday morning pulling out all of our Italian cookbooks, looking for caponata recipes, taking notes as I went. Something of the melting pot appeals to me, the blending of different food cultures. The music of the word, caponata.
I soon realised that there is a huge amount of variation, so my idea of presenting the authentic caponata recipe went out the window. As Giorgio Locatelli writes in the introduction to his recipe in Made in Italy:
“Keep in mind that this is not a fixed recipe; it is something that is done according to taste and you can change it as you like.”
This is my kind of cooking.
Viana la Place’s caponatina used pear for sweetness, which seemed creative, but I feared it would quickly break down to mush. Jamie Oliver uses dried oregano, but I didn’t see that elsewhere. One Marsala chef uses capsicum, but that seems to be exceptional to Western Sicily. Giorgio Locatelli uses fennel and courgette in his, while Ben Tish goes for a maximalist approach, with chocolate, olives, courgette, almonds or pine nuts and mint as the garnish. The most common fresh herb was basil, but I’ve gone with flat parsley for mine. In the end, the recipe I’ve given is closest to the ingredients list in Polpo - A Venetian Cookbook, a book I’ve always loved for its iconic design. Theirs was a simple, pared-back caponata.
I cut down on the oil by shallow-frying the vegetables instead of deep-frying, as most recipes do. I mean really shallow frying. I used around 1-2 T of oil per batch of aubergine and the result was perfect, you just have to make sure to regularly stir and to press the aubergine down to release their liquid. By comparison, some other recipes have 100 ml or more of oil, which just seems excessive and will make the eggplant heavily laden and soggy. I also slow-cooked the caponata on the stovetop rather than in the oven. This results in quite a liquidy dish, with lots of delicious juices that are best mopped up with bread. If you’d rather have something more drier and oilier, then feel free to roast it in the oven as Polpo does instead.
Incidentally, there’s no need to pre-salt your aubergine. It will just result in a saltier dish. I always pre-salted when I first learned to cook aubergine, believing the orthodoxy that salting would draw out the bitter juices, until one day I didn’t and the result was no different. Aubergine is not bitter, and I’d rather not have it taste like it’s been drenched in seawater if I can avoid it. Better to add a bit of salt to the dish later, to taste. Nevertheless, pre-salting aubergine will always have its proponents.
Caponata can be served in any number of ways, but I suggest doing so as part of an antipasti platter, to please the eighteen-year old inside of you who longed one day to throw glamorous, grown-up dinner parties. Pair it with stuffed capsicum, olives, cheeses, fresh bread, roasted grapes, grilled vegetables of any description; a bowl of quickly braised greens with lemon, olive oil and slivers of garlic would also go wonderfully. Eat it over couscous. Or just enjoy it by itself, mopping up the juices with hunks of bread. Eat with your hands. Pay attention to the way the aubergine chunks are both substantial and silken, tender morsels you’ll find yourself rooting around on your plate for, the raisins swollen into bursting balloons of sweetness, the balance of sweet and sour. Perhaps you add some dried chili flakes, a swig of olive oil, olives, a little honey. You can change it as you like.
Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next week, that is, if I haven’t upped sticks and moved to Sicily by then.
Amelia.