Eggplant Parm is For Lovers
And so is Stanley Tucci
Tonight, CNN brings us Stanley Tucci’s first installment in his tour of Italy — a scenic, gastronomic experience that I set up to record weeks ago. Tonight it’s Naples and the Amalfi coast, and though pizza seems the entree in question, I thought about what I cooked recently and how much that dish expresses love and at least American-Italian joy:
Eggplant Parmesan.
I remember as a boy my mother frying eggplant. Clearly, that’s not the only thing I remember about her or her cooking, but something about the word “eggplant” got me and my strange powers of imagination. I couldn’t get it all straight though I was willing to consider what an egg could possibly do that I had never once considered before.
Yet, I was unwilling to take a bite of the fried disc my mother put on my plate. Not so my brother, who relished every bite and then went even more apeshit when he discovered what a green tomato tasted like fried. Neither one of us ate ripe tomatoes at that point, so yeah, a southern kid will devour most anything if it’s floured or “corn-mealed” and then sizzled for a while in hot oil. And oil was always “Wesson Oil” in our house.
So shoot me or not, I balked at fried eggplant until I hit my teen years when something opened up for me, and I found religion — a…
