Melanzane 'Mbuttunate
Stuffed Neapolitan eggplant
"'Mbuttunate" is dialect for imbottite — stuffed, buttoned up. Whole eggplants slit and packed with garlic, anchovy, capers, cheese, and stale bread, fried until golden, then finished slowly in tomato — a cucina povera dish that turns almost nothing in the pantry into a full meal.
The name tells you what the dish is before you've read the recipe: 'mbuttunate is Neapolitan dialect for imbottite, buttoned up or stuffed, the same root that shows up in puparuoli 'mbuttunati, stuffed peppers. Eggplants get the same treatment here — not hollowed out and refilled the way a peperone can be, but slit deeply while still whole, so the filling gets pressed directly into the flesh rather than packed into a cavity.
The filling is built from things that keep: a chopped mix of garlic, parsley, capers, and anchovy fillets, worked in alongside cubes of provola or caciocavallo and torn basil leaves. Nothing here needs to be bought specially for the dish — it's the same short list of pantry staples cucina povera leans on again and again, turned into something that reads as considerably more than the sum of its parts once it's fried and simmered.
Before any of that, the eggplants need to lose their bitterness: sliced with deep vertical cuts, salted in those cuts, and left under a weight in a colander for two to three hours so the bitter liquid drains out. Skipping this step is the single most common way to ruin the dish — modern eggplant varieties are milder than they used to be, but the purge also firms the flesh and keeps it from soaking up excess oil in the fryer. Once rinsed, dried, and stuffed, the eggplants are fried whole in plenty of seed oil until golden on every side, then finished gently in a simple tomato sauce for twenty to thirty minutes, until the sauce has thickened around them and the flavors have had time to settle together.
The recipe
For four. Long, dark eggplants hold the filling better than the round, pale varieties.
Related
Buon appetito.
