Blog the Forty-first: Pickling Cherry Peppers

... or Italian Eggplant "Sott'olio"

It’s pickling time, the perfect time to offer you my meterological theory of Western civilization. Western thought began in the Mediterranean where more often than not the blue sky smiles on you with a golden sun and the rich earth vouchsafes its bounty. If you’re an Aristotle or an Aquinas, you naturally begin reasoning about nature on the premise that she is a loving mother, beautiful, good, and benevolent in her purposes, and you resolve accordingly to seek your wisdom from her. But when human inquiry into nature migrates north, it meets cloud, wind, and hail, ground yielding tubers only if watered by much sweat, and life short, nasty, and brutish; so if you’re a Bacon or a Hobbes, you premise that nature is a cruel stepmother, as stinting of her secrets as of her treasures, and you resolve for your survival to put your mother to the rack until she tells you what you want to know.

That’s why they pickle cucumbers and cabbage up there. It’s a question of surviving the winter. But down in the sunkist land of my people, you pickle because it makes things delicious. It’s a matter of art. Taste their pickled cucumber and our pickled eggplant, or their pickled beets next to our pickled cherry peppers, and you will taste the difference between preservation of life and appetite for it.

Blog the Twenty-first: Is it really Eggplant alla Parmigiana,or alla parmiciana?

Fact is, no one knows—which only goes to show how uninteresting facts really are.  At best, if well chosen, they’ll point out what needs explaining, but they rarely explain it.  They may speak for themselves, as the saying goes, but they don’t have much to say about anything else.  Mostly they just assert themselves, as things needing to be explained. 

A true fact can be a right answer, but a right answer isn’t a reason why.  A reason isn’t just another fact [lest we end up with an endless train of facts and no explanation …], but rather a relation between facts—as of a cause to its effect, or an intention to its end, or a source to its issue.  At best, facts supply the matter of an explanation which, by relating them aright, reveals the truth of the matter.  But as any good liar well knows, you can arrange facts as well to occlude as to reveal the truth.  What you need to tell the truth, more than the facts, is a good story.  There’s an Italian saying, Sed non è vero, è ben detto—“If it’s not true, it’s well said.”  What should happen sometimes tells the truth better than what does happen.

Case in point:  I’ve always been perplexed by Eggplant alla Parmigiana’s being called alla Parmigiana, i.e., Parma-style—Parma being North Italy’s celebrated capital of Parmigiano-Reggiano.  But eggplant parmigiana (dropping the alla in English, with compensatory decapitalization) seems so very southern:  sun-loving eggplant topped with zesty red sauce, oozing sweaty mozzarella—for which South Italy's Campanian buffalo are so famous—and showered with gratings of tangy Pecorino Romano. What do Parmesan cows have to do with any of that, I ask myself.   

So I start working up a diatribe against the pretensions of the Parmesans, about how the true origin of a thing should be credited to its final perfecter rather than its first confecter; that it is not its factual birth that reveals its true nature, but its full flowering; that, whatever inchoate beginnings this eggplant dish may have had among the Parmesans, its true form was clearly achieved in South Italy and disseminated thence throughout the Americas by its emigres ….  You get the idea.

Blog the Eighteenth: Eggplant in Season

Make it easy, make it garlicKy.

The piles of eggplant at market are even higher than those of zucchini, eggplant being summer’s big boy.  This kid is high‑maintenance, though, and has been so from its youth.  Although eggplant’s agricultural history is long debated among those who care, it apparently began as a small prickly green vegetable with bland flesh and a bitter taste.  Being a member of the deadly nightshade family (like its cousin the tomato), it was sometimes feared to be poisonous.  What but an incurably curious omnivore could sustain interest in such a food? 

Human domestication has managed to get rid of eggplant’s pricks, but not always its bitter after-taste, so it often requires purging before cooking.  Cross-breeding has also managed to educe a variety of shapes and colors, one of those being the smallish white ovular variety that has given the fruit its English name.  A momentary mood of linguistic atavism once moved me to overpay for intriguing little white eggplants on offing at the gourmet market.  The recalcitrance of their flesh to flavoring and softening gave me a refresher course in the sophistries of gourmet supermarkets.

Thomas Jefferson brought purple eggplant to America as a table decoration, but it took immigrants of the Mediterranean and Asia to teach Americans how to eat eggplant.  It is labor-intensive food to cook, so as a cook you must understand that its virtue is not so much in its flavor as in the power of its spongy flesh to assimilate the flavors you feed it.  In this respect, it is like white mushrooms.