I used to think moussaka was just one thing: the classic Greek dish that layers eggplant, potatoes, ground meat and tomato sauce under a bubbling top of bechamel. And while I’ve certainly seen plenty of vegetarian recipes — simply leaving out the meat or replacing it with, say, chopped mushrooms — it wasn’t until I was flipping through “The Middle Eastern Vegetarian Cookbook” that I realized I was wrong, in two ways.
Wrong, first, to think moussaka was always what I had thought. In fact, as author Salma Hage writes, “every country and every region has their own version of this much-loved dish.” Every country in that part of the world, anyway. The ingredients and preparation vary: In Turkey, it’s not typically layered and doesn’t have the bechamel topping. In Romania, it’s made with pork and might include cabbage. And so on.
My second mistake was in assuming that any vegetarian version would be an adaptation of the “real” thing. But what drew me to Hage’s rendition was her description of it as traditionally Lebanese.
When she was growing up in Lebanon, she ate a mostly vegetarian diet, “but it was not by choice,” Hage, 74, told me in a Skype conversation from London, where she lives. “We didn’t have a lot of money. We just ate meat now and then, when it was available.”