Skip to main content

Caponata: salad or stew?

I’m no vegetarian; I just like eating them (vegetables, not vegetarians). The following salad - or perhaps it is a stew - is based on those small purple eggplants you find in Italian and Middle Eastern greengrocers, and builds on these with sweet-acid tomatoes, earthy pine nuts, and salty brined olives and capers.

To make it, I cubed about 750g worth of purple eggplant, placed it in a colander, and sprinkled it with a good handful of salt for an hour, before rinsing it off and frying it in batches in olive oil. Then I drained the fried eggplant on paper towels. Meanwhile, I had fried a chopped onion in another pan and, when almost done, added a dozen pitted and chopped Sicilian green olives, a small handful of capers, a punnet of those mini tomatoes about the size of the olives, a cubed celery heart, and a big handful of pine nuts. I cooked all of this for five minutes or so, adding a little more oil.

Then into the fragrant vegetable/nut mixture went the fried eggplant, followed by a teaspoon of sugar, a sprinkling of vinegar, and salt, sparingly. More cooking, about five minutes on low. Then I threw on a scattering of basil leaves and switched off the pan.

As far as aroma, taste and visual appeal go, this 'vegetarian' dish could not be surpassed. I served it alongside a bearnaise-topped rare fillet steak.

Comments

  1. This sounds excellent. I tried canned caponata once. It was... not a good experience. I'm sure yours is better.

    ReplyDelete
  2. There’s another subject for investigation: canned items that shouldn’t be. Such as spaghetti.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment