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Original Italian name: Caponata
Place of origin: Sicily, Southern Italy
Caponata is a typical Sicilian name of one of vegetable dishes with a long and colourful past. Originally, this dish started life as a fish, served in the caupone in taverns around Sicily’s ports. It consisted of squid, celery and eggplants and served with a sweet-and-sour-cream. But nowdays, the Caponata is made exclusively from vegetables -eggplants, onions, celery and tomatoes. Some other vegetables as green olives and carpers should be added to this dish in order to enrich the flavour.
In fact, the most unusual variation of Italian dish is Caponata San Bernardo. It is eggplants combined with a sauce made from plain dark chocolate, almonds, sugar, vinegar and toasted breadcrumbs.
I felt the chocolate version could be a bit extreme for the first time I cooked this dish so decided to keep up with the classical set of ingredients this time.
Ingredients:
300g eggplants, diced
300g onions, finely chopped
3 celery stalks
100g green olives
350g tomatoes
2 tablespoon vegetable oil
3 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
1,5 tablespoon sugar
4 tablespoon vine vinegar
1,5 tablespoon capers
salt and freshly milled black pepper
Method:
Slice eggplants, sprinkle with salt and place in a sieve to allow the bitter juice to drain off.
Finely dice onions, blanch the celery and cut into small pieces. Cut the olives in half and remove the stones. (I would prefer to buy olives with stones everytime and pitted them on my own if necessary. I found the unpitted olives way more tasteful comparing to pitted ones). Blanch the tomatoes and pass them through a sieve. Rinse the eggplants in cold running water, drain them and pat dry.
Heat the vegetable olive oil in a skillet and saute the eggplants on both sides until golden brown. Place on paper towels to remove any excess oil.
Put the extra virgin olive oil in a saucepan and gently saute the onions. Add the celery, pitted olives and sieved tomatoes and season with salt and pepper. Simmer for 5 minutes. Add the sugar, vinegar and simmer for a further 10 minutes until the vinegar fumes have evaropated. Leave the vegetables to cool before serving.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow This looks amazing and is making me hungry
I must be bored today because I got to thinking about how so much of the culinary focus for Americans is based on Italian food.It made me wonder about the opposite,
what Italians think about American food.
Caponata looks delightfully light and flavorful. I’m very intrigued by your mention of the Caponata San Bernardo as well.
@ Jennifer – Welcome to my blog! Well, the eggplant is a fruit not a vegetable so it is a possible reason of such sophisticated recipes;)
@ Regina – Welcome to my blog and thanks for your comment!
I am looking for the recipe for a very simple Italian pastry called
“Chimeli (?)” ( I think). It is just a piece of slighty sweetened dough and usually rolled into a ” dough nut” shape. Can you help?