Southern Italy is deeply fond of eggplant. Throughout the country — but particularly within the regions around and south of Rome — it is fried, stuffed, layered and baked, smoked and pureed and preserved in oil. It is also combined with pasta in a variety of delightfully diverse ways. In Sicily, the combination of pasta with eggplant is so essential that the general name for the dish, Pasta Alla Norma, conveys “pasta in the normal way.”
In one version, the eggplant may be cooked with only garlic and olive oil until it slowly dissolves into a nutty-tasting puree; in others, slices of eggplant may be fried before being heaped atop tomato-slicked tangles of pasta. It might be combined in a syrupy braise with sweet peppers or blended with potatoes and stuffed into ravioli.
Every summer, with some ambassadorial enthusiasm, I parade these variations through the kitchen in a show of eggplant’s delicious versatility. A dish of bucatini cloaked in a chunky, bright-tasting eggplant-tomato sauce has emerged over the years as the favorite — even with my household’s resident eggplant skeptic. It is a recipe I learned from chef Micol Negrin, the founder of the Rustico Cooking school in New York who featured the dish in her 2002 cookbook “Rustico,” a celebratory tutorial of the cooking of each of Italy’s 20 regions.
In that preparation from Calabria, the eggplant is sliced into thin strips and then cooked gently in a pan of garlic-infused olive oil until it collapses. Peeled and grated (or chopped) tomato is added to the pan with fresh oregano to reduce and thicken, and torn basil leaves are tossed in at the end. Once the pasta is ready, it is added to the sauce with a bit of the pasta cooking water.