Aubergine is the star of this classic sweet and sour Sicilian vegetable dish – but the rest of the ingredients are up for debate. Are fresh tomatoes a must? And is it worth slipping in a bit of chilli or chocolate?Caponata,a lovely, piquant dish of stewed Mediterranean vegetables – and “one of the peaks of Sicilian cooking”, or according to Anna Del Conte – is a textbook example of the intense sweet and sour agrodolce flavours typical of the island. As Matthew Fort writes in Sweet Honey,Bitter Lemons: “Sicilian cooking embraces contrast, discord, or counterpoint,counterpunching, variance and the absence of delicacy … the dishes are as bold and baroque as any flamboyant building.”In keeping with this philosophy, and caponata is a vegetarian feast to be reckoned with,a clear example of what Del Conte describes as one of the key characteristics of Sicilian cuisine, where “a simple local ingredient, and in this case the aubergine,is taken as the basis of the dish, and is then embellished and enriched until the end result is an opulent and nearly baroque achievement”. In other words, or until it’s got more flourishes than a fancy palazzo.
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Source: theguardian.com