Erica De Mane

Recipe below: Eggplant Lasagna with a Hint of Moussaka

Eggplant is a big part of my life. When I was a kid it was always around, in our backyard garden, on our kitchen counter, in the oven, on our dining room table, bulbous and black, round and violet. It was normal food, the way string beans might be for most Americans. Nothing much has changed between me and eggplant. I know its smell both raw and cooked. Raw, it smells somewhat bitter but also grassy. Its texture is spongy. You really don’t want to eat it that way, although you could. It’s not poisonous. When cooked it smells mainly of whatever you’ve cooked along with it—garlic, basil, caciocavallo—but it keeps an underlying sweetness, and a creamy texture emerges, maybe with a faint hit of supermarket mushroom. I find its flavor irresistible, and when properly cooked its texture is unique. Soft but with integrity.

Eggplant is a vegetable (a fruit technically) that came from India to Southern Italy with Arab settlers in the ninth century. It is not, like tomatoes and chilis, a New world plant that slowly got worked into Southern Italian cuisine. Considering how much I loved eggplant from an early age, I don’t remember too many preparations from my Italian American youth. Parmigiana, of course. And then there were cutlets—breaded, fried slices that we kids grabbed before they got layered into the parmigiana. They eventually became a dish in themselves, because everyone loved their greasy crispiness. I remember eggplant rollatini filled with ricotta and covered with tomato sauce. There was also a vinegary eggplant shoved into jars. My grandmother made that, but we also bought it from Italian delis. Sometimes it was leathery. I’m not sure how it got that way, but I think it was from being dried out in the oven. In any case the vinegar-drenched stuff wasn’t my favorite, as I wasn’t a big acid eater.

I’ve since experimented with all sorts of Southern Italian ways with eggplant, such as eggplant “meat” balls and pasta alla Norma. I’ve gone wild for Richard Olney’s baked eggplant custard, with eggs and cream, no tomatoes. That was a recipe from Provence the Beautiful, an extravagant book that after a few read-throughs made me feel I’d been had. At some point I discovered the Amalfi Coast’s baked eggplant and chocolate dessert, a tourist favorite that you would think was a recent chef’s creation but in fact is a real traditional dish. It’s really delicious. If you’d like to give it a try, here’s a recipe.

I then went on to make baba ghanoush and many other North African, Middle Eastern, and Greek eggplant dishes, using spices not popular with my contemporary Italian people, who were more into herbs. Eggplant stuffed with rice or couscous or wheat berries and its own scooped out and put back insides, sometimes with whatnots of meat added. I did it my mother’s way, with garlic, basil, and oregano, and I did it Paula Wolfert’s way, with saffron, cinnamon, ginger, and cumin.

One of the most popular Greek eggplant dishes is moussaka, baked with ground lamb in addition to the eggplant, topped with a thick béchamel, and the whole thing seasoned with cinnamon. I love that. When I decided to make this eggplant lasagna, I think I conflated the two and unconsciously came up with a hybrid. But the funny thing is that my sweet spiced eggplant lasagna is most likely closer to what eggplant dishes tasted like in Southern Italy’s pre-tomato time, when there was a freer hand with spices than there is now. I was pretty happy with it. It’s still eggplant season in my New York habitat. If it is where you are, too, maybe you’d like to give this a try.

Eggplant Lasagna with a Hint of Moussaka

I used a 14-by-9-inch oval baking dish for this, but anything more or less equivalent will work fine.

For the eggplant:

2 large eggplants, partially skinned and cut into ½-inch disks
Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt
Black pepper
A sprinkling of ground cinnamon

For the tomato sauce:

Extra-virgin olive oil
1 small summer onion, chopped
2 summer garlic cloves, thinly sliced
7 or 8 medium-size round summer tomatoes, peeled, squeezed of seeds, roughly chopped, and drained for 20 minutes (but retain any tomato water they throw off)
1 fresh bay leaf
A big pinch of sugar
A bigger pinch of ground cinnamon
Sea salt
Black pepper
A splash of sweet Marsala

For the béchamel:

4 tablespoons unsalted butter
3 tablespoons regular flour
3 cups whole milk
1 fresh bay leaf
1 garlic clove, lightly crushed
½ teaspoon allspice
½ teaspoon cinnamon
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
Sea salt
Piment d’espelette to taste
1 large egg yolk

Plus:

1 pound fresh lasagna sheets, boiled, cooled, and laid out in the usual way, which at my house is all over the place.
1½ cups freshly grated parmigiano Reggiano
A big handful of basil leaves, lightly chopped
A palmful of marjoram leaves, lightly chopped

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Coat a sheet pan with a little olive oil (you might need to use two sheet pans). Lay the eggplant rounds on it, and brush the tops of the rounds with more olive oil. Season with salt, black pepper, and a sprinkling of cinnamon. Bake until golden and tender, about 15 minutes or so. I didn’t bother to turn them over. They baked up fine without that.

Leave the oven on while you get on with the rest of the recipe.

Make the tomato sauce: Take out a large skillet, and get it hot over medium heat. Drizzle in about 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Add the onion, and let it soften for a few minutes. Add the garlic, and sauté until it’s fragrant but doesn’t take on much color. Add the tomatoes, the bay leaf, sugar, cinnamon, salt, and black pepper, and let simmer at a low boil for about 5 minutes. Pour in the Marsala, and let it bubble for a few seconds. Turn off the heat. If the sauce seems too tight, add a little of the reserved tomato water.

Drizzle some olive oil into the baking dish, and put down the layer of pasta. Spoon on a layer of tomato sauce, and then a layer of eggplant. Sprinkle on some of the grated Parmigiano, and then scatter on some of the basil and marjoram.

Repeat to make two more layers, ending up with a layer of pasta, holding back a bit of the grated Parmigiano for the top.

Now make the béchamel: Get out a medium-size saucepan, and set it over medium heat. Add the butter, and let it melt. Add the flour, and whisk it into the butter to form a paste. Let cook for a few seconds, to burn off some of the raw flour taste. Now add the milk and all the seasonings. Whisk everything to blend, and let the sauce heat through, whisking frequently until the sauce starts to bubble and becomes thick. Let it cook for about a minute longer, and then take it off the heat. Wait for a minute or so, so it can cool slightly, and then add the egg yolk, whisking it in.

Pour the béchamel over the lasagna, and top it with a final sprinkling of Parmigiano. Bake, uncovered, until the top is golden with little bits of brown and the whole thing is bubbling, about 25 minutes. Let it rest for about 10 minutes or so before serving.