Creamy Thyme and Aubergine Bake

A quickie for now, as this wasn't my recipe. It's from Nigel Slater's Tender Vol. I - which, by the way, is a brilliant option if, like me, you have occasional trouble letting such things as vitamins into your life. And for the herbivores out there, I don't think there is a cookery book I could more highly recommend for putting the veggies first.

Plug over. (I don't even get paid for this stuff.)

Firstly, a few notes about aubergines 
(mainly because they're cool)

There are about a million kinds of aubergine, ranging in colour from white through variagated to purple, in size from the tiny ones in Thai Green Curry to absolutely frigging massive, and in shape from long and skinny through round to big and bulbous.  NOT ONLY is it, technically speaking, a berry (thanks Wikipedia), it's also a close relative of tobacco. More importantly, aubergines are used in cooking all over the world, including Thailand, Turkey and the Middle East, France, Italy, and India.


Nigel will tell you all about salting aubergines in his recipe, and I'm pretty sure he knows best. Salting, by the way, is what you're supposed to do to take the bitterness out of vegetables like aubergines and courgettes, stop them from absorbing too much oil when fried, and improve their taste on cooking. You slice them up, stick them in a sieve, and pour over a load of table salt. Then you leave them for half and hour, and rinse it off again. There's a lot of talk recently about it being unnecessary to salt aubergines nowadays, because the types we grow now are much less bitter than the aubergines of yesteryear. My advice would be, if you're using those big purple aubergines they import to places like Tesco's, you're probably ok - they're not supposed to need salting. If you're using another kind, better safe than sorry and it won't do them any harm.

The Bake

Anyway, this bake is a lot of wonderful things all rolled into one, really. Its star player is the aubergine (eggplant to my American readers), one of my all-time favourite vegetables as it is, but here it's dressed up in its best and really made to shine. Aubergine is usually more friendly with tomatoes than with cream, but somehow in this recipe the thyme ties them together, and the parmesan seasons the whole bundle...and honestly I can't think of another vegetable dish I'd be as happy to serve as a main course!


That's another thing. Thyme. I must be about the only person in the world who feels that it's sometimes over-used (it is in my house, anyway...), but here, like the aubergine, it fits perfectly into its place and shows off like nobody's business! I'm sure you could use rosemary or another woody herb in its place, but it just wouldn't be the same.


Sadly, in the interests of avoiding prosecution for plagiarism I can't give you a straightforward recipe. In short, though, you cook off sliced onion, garlic and aubergine in a pan, layer them in a dish with thyme, salt and pepper sprinkled in there too, pour over a lot of cream, top with parmesan, and bake til it's hot through and golden-bubbly on top. God it's good.


This goes fantastically with things like beef and chicken, and last night we actually ate it with some breaded hake - I find hake is a pretty good blank slate for painting with flavours, so the creamy aubergines were definitely the star of the show that was yesterday's dinner. If you don't want it to upstage your main dish, serve it with something robust like maybe a flavoursome beef braise or a big, hearty stew. That said, it can also take centre-stage if you want it to. I for one have been picking at the leftovers from the fridge all day, which includes having it for lunch.

In conclusion:

Aubergines are very cool vegetables, and utterly delicious. You should eat lots of them, starting with the Creamy Bake and working out from there. Have fun with aubergines. Thank you and goodnight.