One hundred years of one house in Chorlton ....... part 139 ….. just how many ways can you cook Parmigiana di melanzane?

The continuing story of the house Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over 50 years and the families that have lived here since.*

Parmigiana di melanzane, 2021

I would be very surprised if Joe and Mary Ann ever came across aubergines.

Now I might be doing them a disservice, but they lived in our house from 1915 till 1973 which for most people in a tiny suburb of south Manchester was not a time of culinary adventure.

To be fair two world wars and a Depression were not conducive to exploring new foods cooked in different ways.

And here I can’t be sniffy because my experience of aubergines was very late in coming and only happened in the 1980s when I first started going to Greece.

I don’t count my student flirtation with tinned ratatouille which came from the local independent supermarket on Burton Road and contained a smidgen of aubergines.

Parmigiiana di maelanzane, 2022

After Greece it would be another two decades before I came across Parmigiana di melanzane made by Tina’s mum in the family kitchen in Varese, just north of Milan.

This was a revelation.  You take slices of aubergine, fry them in olive oil with or with out a dusting of egg and flour, then layer them alternatively with mozzarella cheese in a dish, top with tomato sauce and bake in the oven.

And after a decent interval they came to Scott’s house, but my attempts while good do not compare with Rosa’s who was born in Naples in 1940 and has been making the dish from as soon as she could.

This week she varied it, telling me that this was not the Neapolitan way but a version from Calabria.

The aubergines were sliced in two, the contents cut in criss crosses thane covered with mozzarella, cover in sauce and wacked in the oven.

It’s the way they are served in restaurants I guess because it is quicker, but as nice as it was I prefer the other way.

fagioli e pasta, 2022

At which point someone will mutter so what, or complain that this has little to do with a century of one house in Chorlton, but I think it does.

Partly because it demonstrates how our tastes have changed over that century, highlighting the growing availability of different foods, but also the culinary adventure many of us who grew up in the 1950s now take for granted.

Of course Brexit and rising inflation may dampen that demand, but those experiences are now out there.

To which I can now add another favourite which is fagioli e pasta, or beans and pasta, which is cheap, filling and nutritious, and a dish which its British variations might pull on potatoes rather than pasta and so tick a meal Joe and Mary Ann might have been familiar with.

Location; Beech Road and Italy

Pictures; Parmigiana di melanzane, 2021 7 2022, and fagioli e pasta, 2022, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*The Story of a House, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house