When aubergines just keep giving ……

So yesterday Rosa made parmigiana di melanzane, which is fried slices of aubergine cooked with layers of mozzarella and tomato sauce.

There was enough for an army and some of the leftovers made their way to work as a packed lunch.

And yet still there was more and this became a variant on pastiera which is another favourite, and consists of pasta, cheese egg and pepper which is cooked in a frying pan.

It is a perfect picnic dish, cut into wedges and is almost a meal in itself.

We will cook it from scratch, but its often what you do with some left-over spaghetti or linguine.

And today Rosa chose to mix what was left of parmigiana di melanzane with some pasta from yesterday with eggs and cheese to make a sort of pastiera.

We saved a little for Tina but in the way of these things there wasn't much.

Both dishes originate from the south of Italy and reflect the greater use of vegetables over meat, and where the poverty of the past put a premium on not wasting any food.

Rosa even confided to me that when she was growing up in Naples during the 1940s and 50s, even the water from the cooked pasta would be used to wash the plates.

All of which made sense if you had to collect all your water from a communal pump outside the apartment.

The family now live in the north where the food tends to be dominated by greater use of dairy products and meat, but although Rosa has embraced some of these ingredients her cooking remains heavily oriented to the sunshine food of the south.

Pictures; parmigiana di melanzane, and pastiera, 2023, from the collection of Andrew Simpson