Salads

PalmI could avoid writing about eggplant, but it's hard to ignore it. It's so present in all our cookbooks that you can't get around it. Stuffed, pickled, fried, in a peach grove, in garlic, sliced on a vegetable cake or toasted... Vicent Andrés Estellés said he liked nothing more than roasted peppers, covered in raw oil, cut into strips. I think I would substitute the Valencian poet's simple and poetic gesture for roasted eggplant. I would lift the fleshy flesh and contemplate it with the same veneration before swallowing it.

Eggplant dishes were common and popular in medieval Catalan cuisine. First, they were boiled briefly or seasoned with salt. Then, they were placed between two wooden cutters or two plates to remove excess water. They were often stuffed with cheese and eggs and seasoned with herbs and spices. The first recipe for stuffed eggplant published in Europe appears in the Sent Soví's Book (14th century). To make it, the eggplants are first boiled, cut into three or four lengthwise pieces. Then they are pressed and a filling is made with cheese, eggs, mint, parsley, moraduix, raisins, and cooked garlic. Everything is chopped, seasoned with spices, and the eggplant slices are stuffed, then placed on a bed of onions in a casserole dish. Before baking, they are covered with almond milk, fat, and oil. This recipe, truly simple and with easily accessible ingredients, set the precedent for the stuffed eggplants that would be collected later.

First recipes for stuffing eggplants

Our recipe books translate this heritage into simple fillings of vegetables, eggs, and herbs. Some versions also include cheese, nuts, or salted fish. Caulas Cookbook: 18th-century Menorcan cuisine This will be a good example, as it is one of our first recipe books to include various recipes for stuffing eggplants. Two recipes use anchovies or salted fish to enrich the filling; the third involves making sweet eggplants stuffed with onions, which are then capolated and sautéed with sugar and spices. In the Mallorcan recipe books of the 18th and 19th centuries, eggplant greixoneres are abundant, to the detriment of the recipe we are discussing today. In the Llabrés Recipe Book (19th century) we find only one recipe, written in the generic form uberchineas (sic), which is made by sautéing onion, boiled eggplant, flour, milk, and eggs. It's like a croquette paste.

Once cooked, they are accompanied with tomato sauce. Mallorcan cuisine (Pere de Alcàntara Penya, 1886) are filled with a paste made from roasted tomato, parsley, garlic, eggs, breadcrumbs, cinnamon, and allspice. As we can see, we find different versions, humble yet tasty thanks to the use of aromatic herbs and spices. Meat as an ingredient in the filling appears in publications from the early 20th century and in wealthy homes, which offered it as a festive dish (Mallorcan kitchen of a gentleman's house, 1927). It is common for the description of most recipes to include at the end the verb 'exalgar', a word almost in disuse, which derives from the Latin insalicare and that we use when we want to sprinkle salt or scatter a pinch.

Today's recipe is a version of the anchovy-stuffed eggplants from the Caulas CookbookYou can make them with just vegetables, adding cheese, or with another fish. I hope you like it.