Poor Man’s Caviar

It’s also called Jewish Eggplant Caviar, Sephardic Eggplant Caviar, Greek Eggplant Caviar, Turkish, and, to round it out, Israeli… and all these variants somehow, for obscure reasons, tied to the Jews, regardless of provenance.

It was my father who introduced me to this dish. He did it the best way possible. He cooked it for me, without ceremony or preamble. He was a far better cook, it turned out (I came to realize, having learned this only in retrospect), than my mother, but he hardly ever prepared anything in the kitchen. His devotions to work, which were not, fundamentally, at a conceptual level very much different from cooking, prevented it. He was a pharmacist and for most of my early youth – until I was seven or eight – he pursued his vocation, for which he was licensed of course, and graced with a degree from the Columbia University College of Pharmacy. He graduated in 1930. From then until he sold his last drugstore, in 1953, he practiced his trade with virtuosity and great seriousness.

As he learned the trade, and the underlying science of pharmacology, at a time when most prescriptions were written for drugs that had to be compounded from elementary components as pure chemicals, and dispensed in whatever form the pharmacist could contrive for ingestion by the patient: sometimes a powder to be dissolved, sometimes a tablet, sometimes a capsule, sometimes an emulsion, sometimes an elixir. It was then common practice – what is now nearly 100 years ago, when, freshly minted as a pharmacist he began to make a living at it, my father got his first job in a working pharmacy. He must have had something of an entrepreneurial spirit, because it was not long before he had gone through a succession of jobs, working for others in junior positions, that he formed his first partnership in a store in the Bronx.

I am not sure how long this first partnership lasted, and don’t recall if there was a second, but I do know that somewhere in the progression of his career, he went solo, and he had at least two stores of which he was sole proprietor, and largely sole employee. It meant, practically speaking, that as a child growing up from infancy – when I was born, he owned what was fated to be his last store: Fenton Pharmacy, on the corner of Fenton Avenue and Boston Post Road in the Bronx, literally across the street from the extensive housing project I called home for the first nine years of my life – I hardly ever saw my father, as he opened very early in the morning, and came home late in the evening. A measure of his devotion to his clientele.

Anyway, my point was, he made up concoctions, from prescriptions, and a variety of ingredients as designated, and prepared in a certain formal order of procedures, and they had to work, which meant no mistakes. Analogously, it has always been suggested to me, no doubt by the self-same practitioner of the pharmaceutical arts that I called my dad, recipes for dishes for cooks to prepare to order, from a variety of ingredients as stipulated in precise measurable amounts (more or less) were more or less the same operation. And called for the same innate skills.

Whatever the confluence (or mere coincidence) of requisite skills, the fact was, in my experience (and, even as a very little boy, I was discerning and discriminating about what “tastes good” to the point of fussiness and censoriousness when a dish didn’t meet my standards; this charmed my father no end, and it was a good thing he would always chuckle when I made my pronouncements, because I am sure this helped mellow what was clearly an over-compensating tendency to carp—a fault I am sorry to say persists into my declining years, when it is at least a little more appropriate to the gerontologic stereotype), all in all, my father was a really good cook.

If I was showing the engagement and attention of true interest in what must have been one of those rare occasions of his leisure coinciding with the opportunity to indulge one of his many culinary favorites, it must have been still some early stage in my development. I had to have been old enough to retain the details of his instruction, however, because I have remembered how to make this dish ever since. Let’s say, I had to have been somewhere between ten and twelve years old. By then, we had moved to Providence RI, because he had changed careers, given the opportunity, and was made sales manager of a small pharmaceutical company that made some very popular over-the-counter items whose success derived from the efficacy of one ingredient, which was virtually a miracle cure, adored by parents around the country for its usefulness in controlling a rampant and unavoidable nuisance ailment of infants: diaper rash.

This all has nothing whatever to do with the cooking lesson my dad decided to bestow on me one day. I forget all specific contextual details. Time of day, day of the week, the weather are absent from memory, but not the ingredients, and not the general order of battle in the preparation of this amazingly simple and delicious dish. It may have been one of the warmer months, and it may have been a weekend, because there was charring of the skin of the main ingredient involved. I do vaguely recall that there may have been a charcoal grill involved – the use of which to some other supercedent application, for example, the grilling of a main course of meat of some kind, necessitated this supplemental cooking device.

I do know we did have an electric cooktop and oven in our kitchen (very much the latest in domestic appliances of the high end variety—it was how I was introduced to the still premium brand of Thermador, which made our excellent kitchen devices). And I do know such a means of producing high heat, otherwise applicable in a great range of methodologies, was not a very efficient way of scorching the outer surfaces of foodstuffs, but especially vegetables.

I remember distinctly my father telling me “I’m going to show you how to make poor man’s caviar,” which he proceeded to suggest, without an outright assertion, that it was perhaps magically even more of a delicacy than the namesake dish that, however old I was, I knew was rare and therefore dear. I also knew eggplants were what you bought at the grocery store. I would have been hard put to find a source for the real thing, though I had already been introduced to the luxury roe by virtue of a very special trip to New York, something of a gustatory baptism, that included a visit to The Russian Tea Room, the acknowledged shrine of celebrants in quest of such piscatory pilgrimages. It’s probably superfluous to add that I loved caviar from my first bite from the statutory spoonful (on a spoon made of bone, the traditional implement for tasting).

In any event, if my father could extract magic from the dubious innards of this strangely gourd-shaped fruit, so be it. And yes, as we always surprisingly learn, usually early in our education of domestic matters, the eggplant, like the tomato, is a fruit, a berry, in fact. Indeed it is related to the tomato and the potato, and like those other two trans-genus indispensable comestibles, it is treated almost exclusively as you would any vegetable. Though I am sure there is some renegade or anarchist chef or wannabe in some overlooked corner of the culinary-industrial imperium, who is feverishly discovering ways of turning the eggplant into some form of bonbon: a foam or a custard, or more like (and not unexpectedly, as you will be able to infer from this recipe) a pudding.

Before leaping right into the recipe, which is straightforward and simple enough, with a modicum, indeed, a minimum of ingredients, I’ll first state that the last few times I went to the trouble of scorching an eggplant somewhere artfully short of incineration, it was to make a dish I also love, called baba ghanoush – an Asian/Middle Eastern/Aegean/Bosphorus kind of a specialty, especially good for dipping, a wonderful accompaniment, a complement really (like a viola to a violin), to that far more popular and ubiquitous vegetal paté called hummus, which is, in contrast, a legume-based meze (to categorize it properly). Baba ghanoush is delicious, smoky, and savory, and, if made right, with all the necessary umamiesque features that are now de rigeur in our regimens.

And as I say, it’s usually baba ghanoush I have as the objective when going to the trouble of singeing an eggplant or two, leaping right over the opportunity of making this equally savory, equally lubricious, equally umami delicacy which is so much simpler and easier and faster to make. It’s easier and simpler and faster (and also cheaper, as it turns out) given that it omits a key additive in so many Middle Eastern meze, not the least of them hummus (the Queen of meze herself), and that is, tahini. Not every household has a supply on hand, and if not, it’s a particular hardship to come by in these days of Covid precautions venturing out for the rare ingredient (though tahini has become almost, but not quite, a regular household grocery stocking item in most super markets).

Plus, poor man’s caviar is the purer product, in terms of concentrating on the core flavors of smoked eggplant (smoked anything really… there being no savory as primeval and beckoning as the flavor of smoke, that evanescent residue of burnt organic matter).

So here is poor man’s caviar

Two medium eggplants
Three tablespoons of olive oil (spring for the better grades of EVOO)
Juice of ½ a fresh lemon
Two cloves of garlic, minced
[optional] ¼ to ½ tsp of ground sumac
[optional] ¼ to ½ tsp hot smoked paprika
[optional] ¼ of a red bell pepper or tomato, minced
[optional] ¼ of a small yellow onion, minced

First, pierce holes around the neck and the base of the eggplants with a coarse sewing needle, or an awl or ice pick will do

Using tongs (and cooking mitts), over a grill or other very hot open flame keep turning the eggplant so all surfaces are exposed to the flame until the skin is scorched, but short of allowing the skin to break down and fail.

The alternative, if a gas or other open flamed device is not available, is to place the eggplant on a lined sheet pan under a broiler in the oven, perhaps between three and five inches from the element. You’ll have to be vigilant about turning the eggplant periodically to ensure uniform scorching of all surfaces.

When the eggplants are done, and are cooled sufficiently to handle without injury, on a clean surface or within a very large bowl, remove all the scorched skin and discard it. There will be a significant amount of fluid inside the eggplant, most of it probably trapped, but perhaps already escaping, so be prepared to drain this fluid (which can be reserved for other cooking uses – which I will not go into in this recipe).

Cut away the stem end, and any remnant of the base that did not get cooked in the process, and discard (I assume you discard such remnants into a compost collector).

Mash the resulting total amount of cooked eggplant flesh, redolent of the smoky residue of the cooking method with a fork. Add one or two tablespoons of the olive oil and the lemon juice. Add the minced garlic, cutting back if you’re not a devotee. And sprinkle in the optional sumac and hot paprika (or either). The latter spices add that frisson of tangy spiciness that brightens up many Middle Eastern and Turkish dishes—and a good replacement for that tang of sea water embedded in the taste of the real mccoy of caviar, the fish eggs, that squirt of our salty primeval roots every time we bite down on the tiny morsels..

At this point, you have a choice for blending the ingredients to the right consistency. You can do it by hand, as I know my father did, steadily and patiently, using the tools you have at hand. A granny fork is a good place to start and potentially the most fatiguing and frustrating, as it will be slowest.

You could also use a mashing device, like a potato masher of the type you hold in your hand. Personally, I like a dough cutter, that crescent shaped hand-held device that has six or seven “blades” (sometimes they’re stout wires), and which conforms to the shape of the inside of a medium to large bowl.

The idea is to break down the cooked flesh of the eggplant into a uniform paste or jam, but no further, that is, so it retains some of the texture of the “eggs” that were part of the eggplant and so its not chunky, but not liquid either.

You can accomplish the same thing, very carefully, using a food processor. The trick is to pulse the ingredients (and the volume is such that you’ll have to be using a very large capacity food processor, as there’s a lot of semi-liquid ingredients that will leak from a smaller processor—most processors have a mark in their bowls to set the limit of the volume of liquid it can contain). Pulse until you have reached the desired consistency of a loose paste. And no further.

What you risk with a food processor is that you will puree the ingredients so it loses all integrity except as a liquid, at which point, you may as well procure some tahini, add some other solid ingredients, and especially the optional onion or tomato and pepper, and make yourself some baba ghanoush.

If you’ve gotten to the right consistency, that’s the time to add the optional tomato and pepper bits, and simply stir them in uniformly. They are meant as much, if not more, for the texture and the bit of color they add, as for any flavor.

When you serve it, drizzle on the last tablespoon of olive oil. I used to like to serve it like real fish-egg caviar: with garnishes of chopped sweet onion, shredded hard-cooked egg yolk, and triangles of toast, preferably pain de mie. Some people also like minced or chopped cornichons as well, as a garnish.

Done right, Poor Man’s Caviar should taste deeply smoky and should linger as a texture and a flavor on the tongue. You can also add some sea salt and fresh ground pepper to taste, but that’s up to you. If you go this latter route, Maldon Smoked Sea Salt Flakes are a real bonus.

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