If anybody could have changed ratatouille from French recipe to American staple, it would have been Julia Child, who included a ratatouille recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking and noted lovingly that it “perfumes the kitchen with the essence of Provence.” One word from Julia, and her fans used to run straight out to buy ingredients they had never cooked with before, but she couldn’t budge them on eggplant. They wouldn’t touch it. By the time she went to work on Volume II, she had decided the reason for so much antipathy must be bad eggplants—too old, too soft, too bitter. Plainly her readers needed precise instructions on how to select eggplants with “the hardness and firmness of immaturity,” she explained in a letter to her editor, Judith Jones. The very thought of those perfect eggplants sent her into a little rapture. “I think of the lovely nubile elbows, arms and knees of Radcliffe freshmen – firm, unwrinkled,” she mused in the letter, thus spontaneously creating what may have been the first eggplant haiku. But her careful shopping instructions weren’t enough. Open an old copy of Mastering to the directions for hollandaise sauce, or Reine de Saba cake, and the pages will be stained and splattered. Open the same copy to ratatouille, and the page will be pristine.
What is it that brings ratatouille back to the newspaper food section, season after season? What inspires cookbook writers to keep turning out those recipes in the face of nearly uniform public indifference? I think the experts just don’t want to admit that eggplant is a losing proposition in America. They can’t bear to turn their backs on a vegetable that the French, the Italians, the Greeks, the Turks—everyone with a great national cuisine—devours with delight. And these days, when the terms “fresh,” “local,” and “seasonal” are essential in any respectable food story, it would be heresy to ignore ratatouille when its gorgeous ingredients are spilling across every farmstand.
Maybe it’s time to admit defeat and put that beautiful eggplant into a centerpiece instead of a skillet. Then, since Americans refuse to adapt to authentic ratatouille, we simply invent a little culinary history and make authentic ratatouille adapt to Americans. Surely some farm wife in Provence went out to the garden one day and found that rabbits had eaten the eggplant, so she used a little extra squash instead. Why not prepare ratatouille her way? Olive oil, onions, peppers, tomatoes, zucchini—it’s simple to cook, and there’s absolutely nothing not to like. Unless, of course, you can’t stand zucchini.
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