"Eggplant is slowly fried until burnished and rich with olive oil, then served with pasta in a garlicky tomato sauce and garnished with aged ricotta salata." J. Kenji López-Alt
J. Kenji López-Alt is talking about Pasta alla Norma here. I am talking about recipes that are not quite that, based on a first recipe - Donna Hay's Roasted eggplant and chilli pasta - the pasta being orrecchiette in this case.
The recipe is not online, but then, like almost all the recipes I shall be listing for you here, it's one of those dead simple recipes that is barely a recipe. Which is often what is so good about Donna Hay. You see the stylishly elegant, picture and are sucked in to make it. The photograph is all with Donna Hay. She is not a lady of many words. But she does always take immense care to present her recipes.
This first recipe is in my second volume from her Simple Essentials series, Pasta, Rice + Noodles. Before you get to the recipe you work through basics like cooking rice, cooking a risotto, and various types of spaghetti. Then you come to pasta and our first recipe, which, as I said, is simple - so simple it is not online and I don't think ever has been. Roast some eggplant with oil and chilli, chop the chilli when done. Cook some garlic in oil, add tomato purée - she says purée, but two cups! Surely she means passata,. Anyway cook this, and when your pasta is done add it to the sauce, add your eggplant chilli and ricotta and mix.
It's sort of Pasta alla Norma which originated in Catania, a village in Sicily, birthplace of Bellini who wrote the opera Norma:
"As the tale goes, a Sicilian playwright was so taken with a pasta dish he was served that he proclaimed it to be a 'Norma' - a term used colloquially by the locals to describe something outstanding, much like Bellini's opera. Thus, the dish was christened Pasta alla Norma." Munchery
Of course there are countless variations but they all revolve around eggplant, tomato sauce and salted ricotta. Which I made once, but then never used - which was stupid of me. I should try it again, next time I have some leftover ricotta. This version of Pasta alla Norma is from Cookie and Kate.
I think the purists say that the eggplant should be fried, not roasted, so Donna Hay strays from Norma by roasting hers and also by using fresh ricotta not the hard salted kind, which is definitely a feature. But then it's hard to get hold of here.
Nigel Slater also strays with his Baked aubergine pasta not just because he bakes the eggplant but also because he ignores cheese altogether because he was going through a phase of not adding cheese to such things. And:
"There is no sauce here, just the sweet, garlicky juices from the roast vegetables."
I suspect that back in the days when we all started cooking 'foreign' food we religiously followed the 'authentic' recipes that were handed to us by those pioneer recipe collectors such as Elizabeth David. Nowadays, everyone wants to put their personal stamp on the classics so they tweak them a bit and depending on their targeted audience the tweaks are extreme like this Pasta with charred aubergine ricotta and mojo de ajo from Thomasina Miers, or almost unnoticeable, as in Donna Hay's first recipe version.
For a moment I got myself confused between Pasta alla Norma and Pasta all'arrabiata, a spicier dish laced with capers and chillis, and also, crucially, without eggplant.
This was because Jamie Oliver had a recipe for Aubergine penne arrabbiata, which confused me for a moment, although it does have similarities to the Norma vibe. I mean it looks as if it could be the same thing almost doesn't it?
As I said, my first recipe from Donna Hay is not online, but I did find another couple of variations made by the lady herself, one further from the original than the other, but you can see how chefs and recipe developers play with things. As do we probably. A recipe, these days, is probably never made exactly the same. It changes over time until it becomes something completely different. I found one very slight change on a website called Spark Recipes which said the recipe for Roasted eggplant, basil and ricotta was from one of Donna Hay's magazines and introduced it by saying: "Please do not use this recipe as it is not original." Which is a very, very, strange thing to say. If you don't want people to make it, why publish it? The tomatoes are missing however. On her website, Donna Hay has two alternatives. In the simpler modification she swapped ricotta for buratta - Creamy tomato, burrata and eggplant pasta, and then added meat in the form of sausage for her Tomato, eggplant and sausage pasta
I also found two other versions which were not so different from Donna's first recipe - Jamie Oliver's Pasta with aubergine and tomato sauce and Gourmet Traveller's Ajvar orrecchiette with ricotta and dill which may sound wildly different until you remember that Ajvar is a Balkan sauce made from eggplant and red peppers. No tomatoes however, and dill is somewhat different.
Rachel Roddy, my current Italian guru along with Jamie Oliver, also plays with the concept of aubergines, tomatoes and ricotta - particularly of the salted kind, beginning with the classic Norma, which she calls Pasta con melanzane but for which she bakes the aubergine because:
"Magical things happen to aubergines when baked whole, although it doesn’t look like it with their skin wrinkling and charring, their taut form collapsing like a deflated bouncy castle the day the fair packs up to move on to a new town. Inside, though, the spongy flesh is transforming into soft almost-silkiness."
In two of those recipes - Aubergine and salted ricotta pasta and Paccheri with aubergine cream, two sorts of tomatoes, mozzarella and basil, the roasted eggplant is transformed into a sauce, but in her Midsummer pasta the eggplant is left in chunks and mixed with zucchini and red pepper too, which I guess shows a progression further and further away from the orginal Norma.
I'm not quite sure whether eggplants are in season or not at the moment. They still seem to be around in abundance and although expensive, they have been more so. So if you are a fan, have a go.
Bearing in mind my comments about the supermarket recipes yesterday being aimed at less experienced or interested cooks, you have to admit that Donna Hay is a really good role model for such people.
I think those two books are for the street library though. I have a couple of her magazines and her massive Classics tome which represent her very well. Indeed I should have another look.
Sort of interestingly, the leftover tart I was going to serve up for dinner was rejected last night and so I had to cook on the fly - pasta with things in the fridge which happened to be ham, leeks, Brussels sprouts, broccolini, passata, cream, sun-dried tomatoes and lots of parsley - oh and garlic of course. Anyone can do that kind of thing surely? It's really all down to the shopping. Maybe we should be taught to shop before we are taught to cook.
POSTSCRIPT
August 10 - I wonder if there is more activity than on the 9th.
2023 - A new word - gastrique (sugar and vinegar reduced together)
2022 - Piccalilli - I have jars of the stuff - must find a way to use it.
2019 - Silverbeet/chard
2018 - The path not taken
2016 - The need for sweetness
Well in complete contrast to yesterday's dearth of posts I think this is the first time I have had a complete set. Enjoy.
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