Berenjenas con miel or miel de caña (eggplant with honey or with cane honey in Spanish) is a specialty of Cordoba, a city in Andalusia in southern Spain. It’s a dish of fried floured eggplant in olive oil that is served with a drizzle of dark color cane molasses. According to Claudia Roden, some use grape molasses, called dibs in Arabic, which is a staple in Arabic cuisine in the Middle East.
As Andalusia, and Cordoba specifically, was a Muslim center for 800 years, with a strong Jewish community, I was curious to check if this dish was adopted by the Sephardi Jews as well.
Eggplant was considered to be a Jewish staple in Medieval Spain, therefor it was considered an inferior fruit to eat (according to Helene Jawhara Pinar’s excellent book Jews, Food, and Spain: The Oldest Medieval Spanish Cookbook and the Sephardic Culinary Heritage.)
Eating eggplant is mentioned in the inquisition papers in Spain, blaming Crypto-Jews for secretly keeping their religion because they served eggplant. One example is of Catalina de Teva, that in 1511 was trialed because she used to lunch on a Shabbat on “a casserole of stuffed eggplant which was eaten cold.”
Satirical poems of the time targeted conversos (Jews who converted to Catholicism in Spain) for their weird foods, including “lots of eggplant and Swiss chard seasoned with saffron” during a wedding (both quotes are from A Drizzle of Honey: The Life and Recipes of Spain’s Secret Jews by David Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson, also a fascinating book.)
In England of the 17th -18th century, after the arrival of Spanish and Portuguese Jews, eggplant was called “Jew’s apple.”
Sephardi Jews spread throughout the Ottoman Empire and North Africa after the expulsion from Spain in 1492. The spread out communities managed to preserve their language, Ladino (or Judaeo-Spanish,) their prayers and customs, and their food for more than 500 years.
If Jews made this eggplant dish while still in Al-Andalus (the name the Muslims gave the Iberian Peninsula) it could probably be found in the repertoire of Sephardi families from the Balkan or North Africa. but I could not find any such recipe in a Jewish Sephardi cookbooks.
I asked a Ladino-speakers group on Facebook if anyone was familiar with the recipe, and to my delight, three Sephardi women, one from Greece and two from Bulgaria, replied that they remember a similar dish of eggplant with sugar on top instead of the honey. It was probably an easy substitute, and a more affordable one in the 20th century, for cane molasses. The eggplant was fried just like in the Andalusian recipe, sprinkled with sugar, and then baked again the oven, probably to melt the sugar a little.
Israelis love eggplant, so much so, that a some cookbooks have separate eggplant chapters in them. Turns out there are strong Jewish-Sephardi roots for that love.
Andalusian fried eggplant and honey (Berenjenas Con Miel)
Course: Appetizers, sidesCuisine: Spanish, AndalusianDifficulty: Easy4
servings20
minutes30
minutes50
minutesBerenjenas con miel or miel de caña (eggplant with honey or with cane honey in Spanish) is a specialty of Cordoba, a city in Andalusia in southern Spain. It’s a dish of fried eggplant in either just flour or a simple batter of flour, egg and liquid. the eggplant is fried in olive oil and served with a drizzle of dark color cane molasses.
*Note: You can buy cane molasses online, or use grape syrup or even date syrup, both available at most Middle Eastern and some Kosher supermarkets.
INGREDIENTS
1 globe (American, or regular) eggplant
Kosher salt
¾ cup all purpose flour
Olive oil for frying
1 tablespoon (or to taste) cane molasses, grape syrup or honey (see note above)
DIRECTIONS
- Remove stem from eggplant and peel. Slice to ¼ inch round or to ¼ inch fries, arrange in layers in a colander over a large bowl, sprinkle each layer with salt and let sit for 30 minutes.
- Wash eggplant and dry with kitchen towel or paper towels.
- In a medium bowl mix flour and ¾ teaspoon salt.
- Coat eat eggplant round in flour on both sides, shake to remove any extra flour and arrange on a tray. If you made eggplant fries, drop a few of them into the flour at once, mix gently to coat in flour, shake and transfer to a tray.
- Line a baking sheet with double layer of paper towels.
- Heat ¼ inch oil in a non stick frying pan and fry eggplant in one layer (you will need to do it in a few batches) until golden on both sides. Transfer to the paper towel lined baking sheet and continue with the rest of the eggplant.
- Transfer eggplant to a serving platter, drizzle with just a little molasses or honey, or let each guest drizzle her own. It’s very tasty without the honey too.