If you ever decide to travel to the Arab world, get ready to eat a lot of pickles.
Aside from the obvious cucumbers and cured olives, you’ll inevitably come across slices of pink-tinged turnips in your falafel, or small baggies of mixed pickled vegetables as a side to your farooj.
The Levant has its own version of pickled eggplant: makdous, delicate little things stuffed with walnuts.* Cheap and lip-smacking, these lil’ dudes hit all the right notes for a tangy, nutritious snack.
But after eating makdous for a few years, I began to crave the stuff I grew up with.
Sometimes when I visited my grandparents in East Haven, Connecticut, my grandmother would break out a jar of pickled eggplant strips, curing in olive oil. If we were lucky, she’d send us home with a bottle, along with the other knickknacks grandparents like to bestow on their children’s families.
I’d put them on sandwiches or even just on their own with a fork (and maybe a pice of bread to sop up the residual oil, delicious in its own right).
Fortunately, I’d had a feeling this would happen before I left the US. The last time my grandmother visited my parents house in New York, I sat down with her and carefully recorded the recipe step by step.
I did, however, have a slight problem with the ingredients.
While her recipe calls for crushed peppers and sliced olives I couldn’t find peppers that were crushed or the right kind of olives. I omitted the olives (they weren’t something I remembered) and settled on whole dried chili peppers, which I figured were better for pickling anyway.
Her recipe also called for red wine vinegar, which is a bit pricy in Beirut. What I did have was red verjuice, a savory near-vinegar made from young wine grapes. Verjuice was popular in medieval european cooking and is not totally uncommon in Levantine cuisine. It’s also fucking delicious. Go get some now.
*As someone recently pointed out to me, you can actually find something very similar to this in Lebanon, but they’re not nearly as common as makdous.
Pickled Eggplant
Ingredients
½ lb (225g) eggplant
4 tsp and another tsp salt, divided
5-6 cups water
½ cup red verjuice
½ cup apple cider vinegar
1 cup olive oil, plus extra to top off the jar
8 dried red peppers
5 cloves garlic, crushed
12 red peppercorns (optional)
Instructions
1. Peel the eggplant and cut into quarters (as shown below).
2. Slice eggplant into strips and assemble on a paper towel-lined plate, making sure the pieces don’t overlap. Dress with the first 2 tsp salt. You’re probably going to need to do multiple layers of eggplant, salt, and paper towels.
3. Cover with paper towels and another plate and weigh it down with a skillet or heavy pot to press out the water. Let it sit for at least three hours.
4. Bring the water, verjuice, remaining tsp salt, and vinegar to a boil in a large pot. In the meantime, squeeze out any excess water from the eggplant strips.
5. Add the eggplant to the boiling liquid and cook for a few minutes until just tender (don’t let it get mushy). Strain and let it cool, again, squeezing out the excess water (I’d recommend wearing gloves when you do it this time so you don’t contaminate the eggplant).
6. In a bowl, mix one cup olive oil, peppers, peppercorns, and crushed garlic cloves. Add the eggplant and mix it all together.
7. Pour the mixture into a sterilized jar and top off with more olive oil until the eggplant is covered. Store in a cool place for at least one week before eating.
theyellowlunchbox 