Recipe: Aubergine au Jambon
I’m back in the Kreyol Kitchen! This time, I’m cooking up eggplants as they are in season. As part of this Kreyol Kitchen journey in which I translate my grandmother’s recipes and hope they come out okay, I gotta say that my first time making Aubergine au Jambon – or eggplant with ham – came out really good!
As you can see from the above recipe, there isn’t a list of ingredients and the directions are not completely thorough, so the following is how I translated it and made it.
Ingredients:
-
- 2 eggplants
- 2 yellow onions
- cooked ham
- grated cheese (I used shredded parmesan)
- 4 large tomatoes
- salt and pepper
- 1 egg yolk (I didn’t actually use this because I wasn’t sure how she meant for it to be incorporated.)
Directions:
- Cut eggplant into fine slices
- Fry the eggplant, and add salt and pepper while it’s cooking
- Cut 2-3 onions, ham, cornichons, capers
- Grease a baking dish
- Arrange a layer of eggplant, then a layer of ham, a layer of onions, a layer of grated cheese, a layer of tomato
- Beat one egg yolk and brown it (I skipped this step because I didn’t understand it.)
- Put it all in the oven (I put it in on 350 degrees F for 40 minutes but it would have been better at 400 degrees F for 20 minutes to get a browner cheese topping and crispier onions.)
Instead of frying the eggplants, I sauteed them in a lot of olive oil on a high temperature, and I only used one pan so that step took the longest, maybe 20-30 minutes. I chopped and sliced everything while the eggplant was cooking and also formed the layers once I had a few cooked eggplant slices ready to go while the other slices were cooking. Also, the ham and Parmesan really give this dish its flavors, so be generous with those.
All in, it probably took me close to an hour and a half but there are ways to be more efficient with this recipe. And it is really easy to make and very good!
For more Kreyol Kitchen recipes, see here, including this eggplant recipe, Aubergine à la Crème.
