Food
Michele Roberts thinks the aubergine needs more love
Published 09 February 2004
There's nothing like aubergine to bring out a woman's inner anorexic
Friends arrived unexpectedly for lunch, before I'd done any food shopping. We cooked, drank and talked, invented dishes with what was to hand in the cupboard. No olive oil. Never mind. Leftover couscous turned into a salad flavoured with saffron, lemon juice, pine nuts and chopped coriander. Chunks of aubergine were simmered in tomato puree loosened with half a bottle of red wine from the night before, spiced with freshly cracked cardamom and crumbled cinnamon, a handful of sultanas. Served cold. Delicious, even without olive oil. I ate a large, greedy helping, and then another.
One of my guests mentioned that most people love aubergines, but are nervous about cooking them. Dieters, in particular, worry about these glossy truncheons, which behave like sponges and absorb masses of olive oil when fried. Such foods have teeth and can bite and must be driven from your door.
Inside many of us, I suppose, is an anorexic struggling to get out. Anorexics, trapped in childhood dilemmas around love and power, use foods as metaphors for desires, rage and fear. You project your aggression not on to your mother, but on to the food she is not there to give you, or the food she forces down you. So aubergines, for example, soaked in oil, become your need and desperation returning to terrify you. Poor mothers. Poor aubergines. Poor deprived and self-depriving anorexics. I remember a middle-aged, matchstick-sized Parisienne, clad in a tiny black lace mini-dress, whom I met in a friend's garden in France one hot summer day. Madame Allumette had made the lunch. She served us heaps of fat, golden aubergine fritters. She herself toyed with a single haricot bean. She watched, sharp-eyed and malicious, as we ate and praised her exquisite food, crisp and crackling outside, melting inside, sweet with oil. All the women in the party were silently furious, we discovered afterwards when we compared notes: she had labelled us gluttons. We acted out her greediness for her. We would get fat, but she never would. She was punishing us for her own thinness. To me, she was neither pretty nor sexy. She had no breasts, for heaven's sake. She was as flat as a slice of aubergine.
Kindness towards aubergine is what we need. I remember the huge trays of moussaka we used to make for student suppers: rather basic mince and fried aubergines bulked out with spuds and bechamel. A better version was served in the wonderful Jimmy's in Soho, that hot, noisy, bustling basement, just affordable, for special occasions, on a student budget. This time, my hungry pursuit took me to the Turkish restaurant Tas, near Waterloo station. A tas, I discovered, is the traditional Anatolian cooking pot. The second word in Turkish I learnt, reading through the menu, was patlican - the name for aubergine. Listed were seven aubergine dishes. I tried the lot. Among the cold starters were zeytin yagli patlican (aubergine, tomatoes, garlic, peppers and chick peas cooked in olive oil) and patlican salatasi (grilled aubergine puree with tahini, olive oil yoghurt and garlic). Next came a hot starter, patlican-biber (fried aubergine and peppers with tomato sauce and yoghurt). Three main dishes aimed at vegetarians were patlicanli (grilled aubergine with tomatoes and peppers served with couscous), turlu (mixed vegetables including aubergines) and patlican dolmasi (stuffed sundried aubergine with yoghurt).
This last was the best. It reminded me of another Turkish speciality, the classic dish imam bayildi, whose name translates as "the imam fainted". Claudia Roden, in her magisterial The New Book of Middle Eastern Food, says that different explanations are given for the origins of this name. Some say that the imam fainted with pleasure on being served it by his wife. Others assert, au contraire, that he collapsed when he heard how expensive the ingredients were, and how much olive oil got used. In fact, Roden adds, the dish is not very expensive to make, and is "a splendid first course". Roden lists in her index 34 aubergine dishes. So really, we don't need to feel nervous about cooking them. We just need to make the time to settle down to reading her wonderful book, a feast not only of recipes but also of titbits of memoir, story and anecdote.
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