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Sicilian Macaroni with Eggplant
Slice one eggplant and put it under a weighted plate to extract the bitter juices. Then fry the slices delicately in lard. Make a ragout of chickens' hearts and livers as follows: Put two tablespoons of butter into a saucepan, fry the hearts and livers, and when cooked add two tablespoons of tomato paste, thinned with hot water (or a corresponding amount of tomato sauce). Cook for fifteen minutes.
Prepare three-quarters of a pound of macaroni, boiled and drained, then put it into the saucepan with the hearts and livers, add the eggplant and three tablespoons of grated Parmesan cheese. Mix well together and serve.
A short recipe that assumes you know what to do with giblets and how long macaroni takes. The hinge is the offal: chicken hearts and livers cook in a few minutes and turn granular if pushed.
- The hearts and liversBuy about half a pound total; a supermarket tub of chicken livers plus hearts from a butcher will do. Sear them in the butter over fairly high heat for two or three minutes only, until browned outside and still rosy within, then add the tomato. The fifteen minutes of simmering that follows is for the sauce, and the livers should be cut into bite-size pieces before or after so they distribute through the pasta.
- Salting the eggplantThe weighted plate does the work of salt here, but modern eggplant is bred far less bitter than 1912 varieties. Salt the slices lightly, weight them 30 minutes, then blot dry — the real benefit now is that drained slices absorb less frying fat.
- LardLard was used for frying in parts of Italy and gives a clean result; olive oil is the closer match to how the dish is cooked in Sicily today. Either way the pan must be properly hot or the slices soak and go greasy. "Delicately" means golden, not brown.
- Tomato pasteConserva of the period was generally denser than modern paste, and in Sicily was sometimes sun-dried, so two tablespoons of modern double-concentrate thinned with a cup or so of hot water is about right. If you use canned tomato sauce instead, count roughly a cup and let it reduce during the fifteen minutes.
- "Prepare" the macaroniBoil in well-salted water to just short of tender, about a minute under the package time, since it finishes in the pan with the sauce. Save a cup of the cooking water; three-quarters of a pound of pasta with this much sauce will want loosening.
- CheeseGrate the Parmesan yourself and add it off the heat with the eggplant, tossing rather than stirring so the fried slices do not collapse into mush.
- YieldThree-quarters of a pound of macaroni feeds four as a first course, three as a main. Nothing here holds well — serve it straight from the pan.
Simple Italian Cookery (1912) was published under the name Antonia Isola, and belongs to the first wave of Italian cookbooks written in English for American households, at a period when Italian food in the United States was still largely regional immigrant cooking rather than a restaurant style. The pairing of fried eggplant, tomato and grated cheese over pasta is a Sicilian signature, best known now through Catania's pasta alla Norma, and the fried-then-folded method here is much the same technique. The instruction to weight sliced eggplant under a plate is a reminder that older cultivars were more bitter than modern ones; the practice is often linked to the vegetable's long-standing reputation in Europe as suspect and in need of correction before eating.