The Lake Palace Hotel’s Aubergine Cooked in the Pickling Style

the brown eggplant sponge you've been waiting for

Does the idea of pickled eggplant sound appealing? How about if it’s super greasy? Great. Because that describes the Lake Palace Hotel’s Aubergine Cooked in the Pickling Style. The Lake Palace Hotel’s Aubergine Cooked in the Pickling Style is a recipe adapted by the Indian-American chef and cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey from the popular dish at the Lake Palace Hotel in Udaipur, India. The recipe can be found in her book, Indian Cooking.

The Lake Palace Hotel’s Aubergine Cooked in the Pickling Style is one of my favorite recipes but I don’t make it super often because it kind of takes over my life when I do. I’m gearing up to cook it again soon. It’s a big undertaking that will also mean cooking Madhur Jaffrey’s Spiced Basmati Rice to soak up and her Gujarti Style Green Beans to offset. Some Raita for cool down probably wouldn’t hurt either. The Spiced Basmati Rice is a fragrant, comforting version of rice cooked with garam masala and onions. The Gujarti Style Green Beans are fried hot and fast with lots of garlic and popped black mustard seeds. The Raita is delicious with yogurt and serrano and walnuts and cilantro. Together they all take dedicated time and effort to make, and eat, but The Lake Palace Hotel’s Aubergine Cooked in the Pickling Style requires the most dedication of all, because it’s so rich and flavorful that, for me at least, it inspires a kind of reverence. I like to really get into it, make the most of it, and savor every bite.

I grew up helping my mom make this recipe and a bunch of others from Jaffrey’s books. My mom was very good at cooking and I was good at eating so this arrangement worked fine. She cooked a lot and made big indian meals for dinner parties almost every weekend. At one point she started doing a pop-up at a local breakfast cafe. Normally the breakfast cafe served breakfast foods at breakfast time but once a week, on Tuesdays, they were open for Indian dinner cooked by my mom. This meant I stayed out of her way as much as possible on Sunday and Monday, while all the planning, shopping, and prepping was going on, but on Tuesday you can be sure I was on hand at the restaurant, waiting for my chance to eat. Leftovers, mostly, but I took what I could get. There was gobi and bahji and allo and saag. There were dals and chutneys and poppadoms. There were halvas and raitas and samosas. Sometimes there was kulfi. All from Madhur Jaffrey’s cookbooks.

My mom never made The Lake Palace Hotel’s Aubergine Cooked in the Pickling Style for the pop-ups though. That one was almost too special, and definitely too time consuming. The Lake Palace Hotel’s Aubergine Cooked in the Pickling Style is the kind of dish that takes forever to make a little bit of, which can be frustrating for me, as I tend to eat-as-I-cook—which for a low yield dish like Lake Palace Hotel’s Aubergine Cooked in the Pickling Style means there can be disappointingly little left when it’s done. But that’s just my problem, and could probably be solved with a shake of discipline and a dash more self-control.

The Lake Palace Hotel’s Aubergine Cooked in the Pickling Style will never win any modeling contests. We love it for its personality. The Lake Palace Hotel’s Aubergine Cooked in the Pickling Style presents as a reddish-grey, glistening, lumpy, oozy kind of situation. The longer it cooks the gloppier it gets, but once the eggplant is soft enough to start taking test bites from the pan then it’s a race to let it finish cooking before you eat it all. It tastes even better once it’s had a chance to meld a bit, better still eaten at the table with rice, and is also fantastic when cold. The Lake Palace Hotel’s Aubergine Cooked in the Pickling Style might just be the best tasting dish ever.

To the uninitiated, The Lake Palace Hotel’s Aubergine Cooked in the Pickling Style might look kind of gross. I didn’t consider this when I brought it to a gathering at the New York home of a friend—a french food designer and chef, who was hospitable and generous with wonderful taste. In other words, there was always an amazing spread at her place, beautifully presented and delicious. I spent the day of the party hard at work, making The Lake Palace Hotel’s Aubergine Cooked in the Pickling Style. The final result was a tiny amount of bumpy grey sludge. I shoved it into a tupperware and went to the party, excited, not thinking about how unappetizing it looked. I opened the lid to show everyone. “This is like, an eggplant dish,” I said. I didn’t dare try to pronounce Aubergine in front of my french friend. But then she tasted it, and The Lake Palace Hotel’s Aubergine Cooked in the Pickling Style spoke for itself.

I’m tempted to say that in other iterations I don’t even like eggplant, but I just remembered Jaffrey’s recipe for fried aubergine slices, served hot and finished with lemon juice and cayenne and salt, so I won’t. There are so many incredible recipes to be found in her cookbooks, like her dry, lemony okra, and her Sooke aloo: potatoes encrusted in a ginger/garlic paste, then browned until crisp. Someday I want to write about her tomato-apricot chutney, made unutterably divine by the inclusion of a resin called asafoetida… the flavor of which is difficult to describe—maybe the best way is to say that it tastes like it’s spelled, but good.

One thing that is cool about Madhur Jaffrey, besides her cooking and her writing and her recipe for The Lake Palace Hotel’s Aubergine Cooked in the Pickling Style, is that she is an actor and plays all kinds of diverse and interesting parts. She is cool like that. She has even been in a couple of rap videos. I particularly enjoy the one by the rapper Mr. Cardamom.

There are a lot of Indian restaurants in the U.S., but even if you stacked all their best dishes on top of each other from the beginning of time and then extracted the essence of what made each them good it would not compare to the food you can make from Madhur Jaffery’s cookbooks. (Except for Shalimar in San Luis Obispo. They have a fantastic bhindi dish. And Rita’s Gate in Santa Monica is pretty great.) But mostly, when I read words like “saag” and “aloo” and “gobi” it conjures an image and taste of specific and ubiquitous dishes featuring those vegetables that tend to be found in a lot of restaurants. The food from her cookbooks is nothing like that stuff. I’ve never had anything like The Lake Palace Hotel’s Aubergine Cooked in the Pickling Style at a restaurant.

Speaking of The Lake Palace Hotel’s Aubergine Cooked in the Pickling Style—why is it so good? It’s time to talk about the recipe. The thing about The Lake Palace Hotel’s Aubergine Cooked in the Pickling Style that makes it so good is the ginger, and the tomato and the oil and the fennel seeds and the kalonji and the cayenne and the garlic and the coriander. Because those are the ingredients. The eggplant just kind of soaks them all in, like a sponge, as it slowly browns and disintegrates. Maybe that doesn’t sound super appetizing, but please understand that this is the disintegrated brown eggplant sponge you’ve been waiting for.