(One more scan from the Betty Crocker New Boys and Girls Cook Book)
I used to see eggplant in the supermarket when I was a kid, but I could never figure out what people did with it. It was a complete unknown to me: What did it look like under the skin? Which part did you eat? Where did the eggs come into it? All this remained a mystery, because we literally never had eggplant in our house.
Eventually I learned that this was no accident.
My father’s mother, whom he called “Ma,” was an excellent cook. In fact, she was a professional cook before she married my grandfather (“Pa”), and although there were eight kids in the family, and it was the Depression, the food was always plentiful and good.
Breaded pork chops were one of Ma’s particular accomplishments. Nobody makes breaded pork chops any more, because they are pretty much the definition of unhealthy food, and that’s a shame. Ma taught my mother to make them, and they were one of our favorite foods when we were growing up. After my sister got married, her in-laws used to drive 100 miles from the Chicago suburbs to South Bend just to have Mom’s breaded pork chops.
Back to Dad’s childhood trauma: One day, probably in the late 1930s, Dad sat down at the dinner table to what appeared to be a large platter of breaded pork chops. No one told him otherwise, so it wasn’t until he bit into one that he discovered that his mother was trying a new dish: breaded eggplant.
From that moment on, eggplant was anathema to him. We never, ever had it in our house, not even in the vegetarian-friendly 1970s, which were arguably the glory days of eggplant. The first time I ate eggplant, I was in graduate school. A guy who was trying (unsuccessfully as it turned out) to win my affections fixed me a big pan of eggplant parmesan from his family’s traditional recipe.
And reader, I loved it.