An impression of a dish can be very different when you first encounter it as an eater, rather than as a cook. For anyonemaking caponata, the largest presence in the dish is the eggplant. However, spooning caponata out of the can (and marveling at how Progresso manages to get just one single green olive into each of them), I had the impression of a kind of vegetablesweetmeat —the mouth lingering not on any particular ingredient but on the syrupy sweet-and-sour savor and distinctly meaty texture of the whole.
At the time I knew even less about Italian cooking than I do now, and I had no idea that caponata was a Sicilian specialty. But I was surprised and intrigued by the complexity that was somehow bestowed on what was, after all, nothing more than a bunch of ordinary vegetables. It seemed exotic in what I took to be a very Mediterranean way, something you might be served in a Greek or Turkish taverna, or on the table of an exiled Sephardic family anywhere in the Levant.
As we shall see, there was some truth to this. But, more to the point, and unbeknownst to me, that mouthful of canned eggplant appetizer succeeded in capturing something, muffled and tinny though the echo was, of Sicilian cooking, where nearly every dish seems a medley of Mediterranean flavors. Turks, Greeks, Spaniards, Africans, Sephardic Jews: all have had their turn at stirring the pot.
If you’ve never encountered caponata, you should imagine a delicious mélange of vegetables cooked and served, usually at room temperature, in a slightly viscous sweet-and-sour sauce—the vegetables’ own cooking liquid plus a touch of wine vinegar and sugar. Eggplant provides the substance, augmented and highlighted by celery and sometimes sweet red pepper; tomato and onion melt into a sauce. The Mediterranean aspect comes from the flavorings, which at their simplest include capers, olives (green, but sometimes also black), garlic, and parsley. Further additions include, most usually, raisins andpignoli.
Mary Taylor Simeti explains in her book on Sicilian cooking,Pomp and Sustenance, that caponata is an elaboration of a humble preparation that occurs all over the Mediterranean. This, she writes, “consists of frying small pieces of eggplant in oil, then simmering them or simply covering them with a sauce or dressing.” As an illustration, she offers a version from Ustica, a tiny island off the Palermo coast. In it the fried eggplant is put into a serving dish, sprinkled with white wine vinegar, sugar, minced fresh mint, and slices of raw garlic. Then it is allowed to sit until the flavors mingle and the dish has cooled.
About as far out to sea to the south of Sicily as Ustica is to the north lies another island, Malta, a former British colony and now an independent state. In herMediterranean Vegetable Cookery, Rena Salaman gives a Maltese recipe for a caponata-like dish calledbringiel agrodolce, where pieces of eggplant are sautéed in olive oil, then crushed tomatoes, garlic, and fresh mint are added and cooked into a sauce. Theagrodolce of wine vinegar and sugar is mixed in, and the dish, again, is allowed to rest. Salaman writes: “Sweet-and-sour dishes found their way along the North African coast and into Europe during the Arab invasions of the seventh and eighth centuries…. Similar dishes are found in Sicily, Spain, and the Arab countries.” They are found in Greece, too, wheremelitzanes stifatho is a near clone of the Maltese dish, except that the herbs are often sweet basil and bay instead of mint.
At some point in the past, this still simple dish reached Sicily, where it was embraced, and bestowed with a uniquely Sicilian—even Palermitan—personality. Palermitan means “of or from Palermo,” and I would never have had the insight, or nerve, to make so exact a connection, despite a few clues I found pointing to it, had Matt not been reading to me—fromThe New Yorker —an account of Palermitan life and architecture by Fernanda Eberstadt. I was just then mulling over the origins of caponata, and this picture portrait of Palermo put in my hand the key piece to the jigsaw puzzle. Suddenly, all the parts fell together in seamless, illuminating fit.
Sicily has belonged at one time or another to every powerful Mediterranean civilization, without ever possessing a defining culture of its own, and Sicilian taste is a confusing but headytutti-frutti of bits and pieces taken from them all. This is nowhere more apparent than in Palermo, the provincial capital, where churches built at the time of the Crusades by Norman rulers out of the same sober gray stone as their counterparts in France and England sport pink stucco domes instead of slate roofs and reveal interiors where polyphonic Islamic and Byzantine motifs run riot. And its history ever since has only built on and compounded this fecund cultural confusion.
Today, located out of the mainstream of both modern Sicilian commerce and a booming tourist trade, Palermo seems less an important city than an old, battered wardrobe, a repository for all the fancy costumes of that island’s bizarrely complicated history, left there in a careless jumble for the current inhabitants to root around in for anything that claims their eye. Consider, for example, the decor of a shiny red food stall that Eberstadt noted in Vucciria, one of Palermo’s many outdoor markets:
wallpapered in gold-and-brown coffee-bean wrapping paper; festooned with crimson poinsettias and with branches of mistletoe and bittersweet, sage and laurel; lit by strings of green and blue bulbs overhead; furnished with chairs, curtains, a television set, votive candles illuminating a tiny red altar to the Madonna, and covered with sepia photographs of the vendor’s stout, unsmiling mother and father, mother and grandparents, father and uncles circa 1920.
This, all in the background; in the foreground are the vendor’s wares themselves: a panoply of olives, whole and stuffed, all different types and colors, set out in pails; mammoth three-liter, chrome-yellow tins of salted anchovies; and stacked jars of scarlet roasted peppers.
Translate this promiscuous flamboyance into pottery and you have majolica; into theater and you have Palermo’s life-sized puppet shows; into cuisine and you have … caponata. InItinerari palermitani, Gaetano Falzone attributes its invention to just this Palermitan flair for mixing up different culinary influences in a single dish, and Antonio Cardella, inSicilia e le isole in bocca, puts caponata in this kind of neighborhood:
At last we are in Via Alloro, a narrow street, main artery of the ancient ward of Palermo called Kalsa, crowded with phantasms of a more or less remote but still impressive past. If you happen [to come here] at noon during spring, you will smell a pleasant sweet-sour scent fluttering through the alleys swarming with people: women in the humble kitchens of their even more humble houses prepare the well-known “caponata” of eggplants or else yellow pumpkin in sweet-sour sauce.
As advocates of the “Mediterranean Diet” have been drumming into our heads recently, few countries bordering on the Mediterranean can support a meat-rich diet. Even today, fresh meat remains a luxury for the less affluent.54The sheep flock is weeded of surplus lambs in the spring and chickens that stop laying go straight to the pot, and that, for the less affluent, is mostly that. The passion that Italians have invested in making salami and prosciutto is as much testimony to the culinary mileage that can be gotten from suchsalume —all served in paper-thin slices—as to the need to preserve without waste every bit of the slaughtered pig before the advent of refrigeration.
Consequently, southern Italian cooking depends, as do other Medi-terranean cuisines, on such protein-supplying substitutes as legumes and cheeses, which are put to lavish and imaginative use. But, as if to prove that a meat-spare diet springs from no inherent dietary prudence but from a keenly felt deprivation, it is also rich in meat analog.55Brine-cured olives may start the list, but it quickly expands into the fleshy-textured vegetables that, grilled over charcoal, take on a resemblance to animal flesh, an impersonation heightened still further by a lavish anointing of olive oil.
Perhaps the simplest, and hence most astonishing, of these analogs is a dish of sweet red peppers grilled, peeled, and served at room temperature, dressed in their own juices enriched with just a dribble of olive oil. In color, sweetness, and succulent texture, the roasted pepper flesh is not so much “like” rare roast beef as what rare roast beef might aspire to, if a cut of me
at could have an aspiration.
Eggplant, of course, can be prepared in the same way—roasted over a fire and the flesh then tossed in oil—and the result is also delicious, but no one would ever confuse it, in this state, for meat. What it is more like, really, is chunks offat. This connection is all the more obvious when you think of how it is used as a sop for olive oil in many Italian—and other Mediterranean—dishes. We, with our meat-rich and, especially, fat-rich diet, tend to accuse these dishes of being “drenched” in oil, but in their proper context they are sublime—as good as any mouthful of roast pork, and probably no more caloric.
It is only in keeping with our understanding of the Palermitan culinary sensibility to imagine its cooks enriching not so much the dish as its metaphorical implications. The synergistic combination of oil and eggplant provides the fat; the celery (especially) and olives add a generous portion of meaty, slightly gristly flesh. Finally, theagrodolce, plus the seasonings and tomato, combines sweet, salt, and sour to produce a thick, rich, and darkly colored blood. Effect is added to effect, until before us lies the savory interior of an entirely edible, fabulously rococo beast.
InClassic Techniques of Italian Cooking, Giuliano Bugialli argues that the word caponata derives from medieval ways of cooking capons, which were often prepared with anagrodolce sauce. This preparation was then applied, he suggests, to the cooking of eggplant. Perhaps, however, he has got the cart before the horse. As we have seen, the dish most likely arrived in Sicily not from Italy but from the Middle East; Sicilians might have given the dish its name simply in recognition of its similarity to the delicate, moist, and tasty flesh of the bird.
“Little capon” it may well be named, but some Sicilian cooks have seemed more intent on transmogrifying it into a miniature basilisk, cockatrice, hippogriff, or whatever you would call the monstrous beast assembled from the parts that make up the following definition of caponata, given by Spike and Charmane Hughes in theirPocket Guide to Italian Food and Wine:
an elaborate dish of aubergine [eggplant], olives, celery, capers, hard-boiled egg, baby octopus, lobster, prawns, smoked tunny-fish roe and swordfish, all covered with a sweet-sour sauce made of almonds, olive oil, bread, anchovies, orange juice, sugar, grated chocolate, and vinegar.
Give the weight of literal transliteration to an evanescent gesture, and you’re likely to end up with a heavy, indigestible, and misunderstood dish. Sicilian cooking, with its love of dramatic flourishes, is especially vulnerable to bad translation. Add to this the effect of its sensual abandon on Anglo-Saxon imaginations, which fail to understand the essential simplicity of means that underlies it, and you have a surefire recipe for disaster. Waverley Root, for example, devotes three whole pages to caponata in hisFood of Italy: they are at once informative, entertaining, and perversely wrong-headed.
To make a true caponata, Root insists, you must sauté all five of the chief ingredients—eggplants, peppers, tomatoes, onions, and celery—separately; season each with its own appropriate herbs and spices; and cook each an exactly determined time. These separately and perfectly cooked vegetables are then finished up in an “enormous iron skillet with vinegar, capers, olives, a little tomato sauce and a hint of anchovy juice” and served “still sizzling in the skillet.” The result is a dish with “as many different flavors as it has ingredients” that “melts away in the mouth almost as literally as ice cream.”
While I doubt that Spike and Charmane Hughes ever tasted a version of caponata that matched their definition of it, I do believe that Root had eaten one made the way he describes and that it tasted as good as he says. But it was served to him in a restaurant; it was a chef’s bravura creation, and from it Root deduced several rules that, on soberer reflection, he should have realized were really exceptions to them—starting with the fact that caponata is usually served at room temperature, precisely in order to allow the ingredients time to cool together and thus give their flavors a chance to meld.
Instead, this passage, with its sizzling skillet and mouth-watering flavors, makes such heady reading that few food writers who encounter it escape unscathed. Donaldo Soviero, inLa Vera Cucina Italiana, quotes it approvingly at length, and Jo Bettoja, although she never specifically mentions it, echoes it almost word for word inSouthern Italian Cooking, including these instructions: “[W]hen more than one vegetable is used in a caponata, each one is cooked separately and seasoned with its own herbs and spices, so they retain their own distinct flavors.” But whatare these separate herbs and spices? When Root gets around to giving a recipe for caponata inThe Best of Italian Cookery, he says not one word about them.56And, even more tellingly—since her recipe follows directly after this advice—neither does Jo Bettoja.
However, she does make a point of sautéing the eggplant, celery, and onion separately. For some cooks, this has become anidée fixe. Consider Carlo Middione’s rather bullying imperatives inThe Food of Southern Italy: “The three major ingredients, eggplant, celery, and onions, are cooked separately. Use the same pan, cooking one after the other. This is extremely important. Do not try to make this dish otherwise.” Oh, Carlo, come on.
At this point it is worth recalling that many Sicilian cooks gain the same effect simply by timing when the vegetables go into the pot. Nor does everyone agree that the ingredients of caponata should beà point. Arthur Schwartz, restaurant critic forThe New York Daily News, writes in his cookbookWhat to Eat When You Think There’s Nothing in the House to Eat: “American cooks don’t seem to understand that the eggplant is supposed to be soft, not firm; that the chunky mixture should hold together, not fall into separate vegetable pieces.” And, if the idea is to keep the flavor of each major ingredient separate (which makes sense only if the caponata is to be eaten, as Root suggests, directly from the skillet), why not go all the way and follow the example of Jacques Médecin, who inCuisine niçoise insists on cooking each of the basic ingredients of hisratatouille in its own skillet?
I have never been to Sicily, and, even if I had, I doubt if I would have wheedled out of anyone the secret of “true” caponata. After all, it is by its very nature a dish to which ingredients can be added with abandon, and every Sicilian town and village—and possibly every family—has its own way of making it. But understand its power over the appetite—which has nothing to do with separate sautés or secret flavorings but with the way that theagrodolce enhances and transforms its voluptuously meaty texture—and you can safely wend your way through the shouting and posturing of the various recipe writers, as vehement in their own way as an aisle of Sicilian fish vendors competing for your custom.
We ourselves began to make caponata with the idea of resurrecting my use of it as a simple pasta sauce—not at all a traditional use!—along the lines of the vegetable pastas discussed on pages 197–204. In other words, we wanted to eat a lot of it, and thus wanted to make it as lean as we could without denying it any of its essential succulence.
Even at this simple level, there are still decisions to be made, starting with the preparation of the eggplant. Many recipes encourage you to do without the salting, soaking, and subsequent wringing out of that vegetable, supposedly to rid it of its bitter juices. We do it, however, because the process gives the eggplant a denser, chewier texture. The eggplant can be peeled or not, as you choose. We like it with the peel.
Also, we decided to add the flesh of a sweet red pepper, which is not generally considered an essential ingredient, because it increases the impression of meatiness, allowing us to decrease the amount of olive oil. (If you plan to serve it as an appetizer, you may want to use more olive oil.) You may also choose to add other traditional ingredients, like raisins, pine nuts, or even a teaspoon or so of cocoa, all of which would be added during the last few minutes of cooking. Finally, Giuliano Bugialli, inClassic Techniques of Italian Cooking, offers a tomatoless Tuscan version of caponata in which, instead, two tablespoons of tomato paste are blended into half a cup of water and mixed with the sugar and vinegar to make a sauce at the last
minute. This produces a thicker, more syrupy caponata that is more emphatically a relish.
We find that caponata freezes well, and we put aside half of each batch in this way. The following amount, served with four ounces of pasta per person, makes a generous meal for four. (We eat it without cheese.) It is also delicious on plain boiled rice. But the easiest way to turn it into a meal is to empty a can of chunk tuna on top of it—a dish that Arthur Schwartz says he has been eating regularly for twenty years. Carlo Middione suggests serving it with roast meat or poultry or stuffed into hollowed-out, medium-sized tomatoes, which are then heated in the oven until their skins start to soften. Sicilians often eat it simply with some bread and a glass of red wine.
CAPONATA CASA NOSTRA
[serves 4 to 8]
2 pounds eggplant (about 2 large)
1 tablespoon coarse kosher salt
1 pound yellow onions (about 3 medium)
1 large red bell pepper
5 or 6 stalks celery, with leaves
6 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon crushed hot red pepper
3 or 4 cloves of garlic, peeled
1 28-ounce can tomatoes in juice
about 10 Kalamata-style black olives, pitted
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