Aubergine

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It's about 8 inches long, purple, bulbous and threatening. It comes on like a fruit, behaves like a vegetable but in real life it's a berry. Reputed to have caused an imam to faint (if only), it is a close relative of deadly nightshade , contains nicotinic alkaloids (I'm beginning to enjoy this) and despite its unfortunate connection with Gordon Ramsay (be still my beating heart) is loved the world over variously as the brinjal, egg-plant, guinea squash or as we call it down the road, aubergine.

I love it in dhansak or simply as a dry-ish bhaji, the subtle sour bitterness and the yielding yet coherent flesh partnering  the sweet slick of glossy tomato, with aromatic kasoori methi sounding the top note, smelling of tea dust. I love it in baba ganoush ( goes with almost anything), but most of all I love it in moussaka.

It's a paradox that until recently, despite having some of the loveliest raw ingredients in the whole of Europe, the majority of Greek cooking was so fundamentally flawed as to verge on the uneatable. I invariably lost weight during a visit to Greece, if not from the sheer awfulness of the cooking, then from the effects of the cooks' imaginative attitude to personal hygiene, and I suffered through many a moussaka, which if sufficiently wrung out, could have fuelled my hire car for the rest of the holiday. It does not have to be like this.

Why do we salt an aubergine? (If you don't, you should.) It's not to draw out the bitterness as the books may tell you - in any case, that's half the point - but, if the slices are then also lightly floured, it inhibits them from absorbing vast quantities of oil when fried on a moderate to high heat to form the first stage of a moussaka. What follows owes a heavy debt to Simon Hopkinson's recipe, to be found in The Prawn Cocktail Years (Macmillan, 1997), which contains in the course of many recipes not a single wasted or irrelevant word.

You will first have fried some seasoned minced lamb - beef is allowed (why ever not) and I am very fond of this heretical version - drained it in a colander of most of its fat and combined it with some onions and garlic lightly sweated, some red wine, some tomato purée, a pinch of cinnamon and some parsley, and cooked until well reduced - almost dry, in fact. Having made a good béchamel (this involves the heating and subsequent steeping of aromatics of your choice in the milk before cooking), added some Greek, not Danish, feta cheese - not a huge amount or it will become assertive and swaggery -  you can then layer up the moussaka in a nice earthenware dish, starting with the aubergines to cover the base, continuing with a layer of meat sauce, a second layer of aubergine and finally, the béchamel. Cook in a moderate to hot oven (190º ish) for around forty minutes, until it is brown, bubbling, crusted and delicious. This is good served with a few plain leaves, dressed with olive oil and lemon, and some Greek bread if you can get it - not the Cypriot flat stuff, but the proper psomi, nut-coloured crust, yellowy crumb, warm and smelling of summer days. You can get close by adding some semolina to your usual bread dough.

Our thanks to Nick Butters for his contribution:

Bio:

"I am a food lover which is a polite way of saying, a food obsessive. I recently returned to my beloved north-east after 25 years working away in London, at sea and in France. I've been cooking for the last 35 years or so and it has been my entertainment, my passion and my solace. Everywhere I go I hear the message that British food has never been more varied, more exciting or more delicious. So, if you are in food and think I can help you get your message across please take a look at the services page of my blog, http://www.creamandbacon.com/ , or write to me directly at nicholas.butters@yahoo.com "