The Greatest Eggplant Recipe Comes From Romania (2024)

Good food is worth a thousand words—sometimes more. In My Family Recipe, a writer shares the story of a single dish that’s meaningful to them and their loved ones.

My grandma’s grandma left Romania for America 130-something years ago. She was 12 or 13 or 14 and her name was Anna “S-c-h-o-r,” Grandma spelled to me over the phone. When I asked why Anna left, she sounded surprised by the question. Wasn’t it obvious? “Because we’re Jewish.”

In the late 19th century, there was a mass emigration of Jews leaving Eastern Europe, largely to Western Europe and the United States. According to A History of the Jewish People by H.H. Ben-Sasson: “In Rumania, the government and population conducted an economic war on the Jews, the declared aim of which was to drive them out of the country.”

And so Anna left. It goes without saying that I never met her, but Grandma says she was sweet, “a lovely housewife and mother.” She was also a lovely cook, which, unlike her surname, I already knew. I’ve been eating Anna’s spoonable, garlicky, olive oily eggplant spread my entire life.

It’s a simple dish: You roast an eggplant and bell pepper into oblivion. Peel and chop them. Mix with raw onion and garlic, olive oil and vinegar. Lots of salt. And that’s it.

If you want to know what it’s called, well, same. I don’t know. No one in my family does, at least not for sure. When I was growing up, we called it “Grandma’s eggplant,” or “Grandma eggplant,” or shorter still, “eggplant.”

Its Romanian name fell off the map years ago. When I asked Grandma what she called it when she was growing up, her answer turned out to be the same as mine: “We just called it ‘eggplant,’” she laughed. “Or chopped eggplant. Or eggplant appetizer.”

But I kept wondering what Anna called it.

Sometime in the last few years, we started to think the mystery word might be potlagel, pronounced pot-lah-gel. Google this and you’ll get an unconvincing 5,960 results. Yet the top hits lead to blog comment sections that sound a lot like my family’s living room: people talking about the best eggplant dish they ever ate, which came from a grandmother who came from Romania.

Say, on Tales of a Kitchen, the author Chris Anca shares a recipe for “Traditional Roasted Eggplant Salad.” She writes about how “back home, in Romania, we had to cook with the seasons.” Her mother froze roasted eggplants just to make this dish—a close cousin to Anna’s recipe. Anca’s family uses mustard, ours doesn’t. We include roasted bell pepper, they don’t. But the spirit is the same.

The comment section is where it gets good:

“Exact recipe my great grandmother always made except for the mustard,” Joanna writes. “I’m 3 generations away from Romanian living so I speak, well…none. My great grandmother always called this dish something that sounded like: pot laja. Can you tell me the actual Romanian name?”

“Oh, I think it has different traditional names depending on region within Romania!” Anca replies. “We just call it eggplant ‘salad.’”

Then everyone starts chiming in.

“We call it potlagel,” Lynn says. “My mother has been craving it lately (her mother was Roumanian)—so I’ve been making it for her. No mustard or lemon juice in our recipe (although I would like to add some, or some garlic), as Mom wants it with just onions.”

Rebecca’s grandmother “made that also!” But she spelled it “put la jell.”

Fredi’s grandmother also made that also! Her family called it “putlagella” but “I have no idea how it is spelled!”

So at least I’m not the only one.

If you start to beep-boop-bop on Google translate, these words start to make more sense. Translate the English eggplant into Romanian and you get vânătă or pătlăgea vânătă. Similarly, translate eggplant into Yiddish and you get פּאַטלעזשאַן or patlezhan. Both of which sound pretty close to potlagel.

Then I hit a bump in the road. The more digging I did, the more I started to notice another, totally different term: salata de vinete. On the blog My Weekend Kitchen, author Ashima Ashima Goyal Siraj writes: “Romanians actually call this deliciously smoky eggplant dip, a salad—Salata de Vinete (eggplant salad).”

Indeed, the plural eggplants translates to the Romanian vinete, a derivative of the above vânătă. Meanwhile, salad translates to salată (big surprise). Why didn’t that name stick around in my family? Herman Edel’s book Red Horse Radish has an idea:

“What is ‘Salada de Venita’? Well first of all, that is its Romanian name, while it is called ‘Potla Jel’ in Yiddish and probably had as many other names as there were other tongues spoken in this crazy world. Whatever the name, it is simply the most delicious salad that has ever been created.”

Or is it? The easy explanation for this dish's apparent lack of popularity would be: People don’t like eggplant spread (or salad or dip or whatever you want to call it). But we all know that isn’t true. Because eggplant spread is pretty popular.

Just ask baba ganoush. This Middle Eastern eggplant spread recipe yields, let’s see, 1,920,000 results on Google. One of which is an eggplant roundup by Bon Appétit called “Beyond Baba Ganoush”, as if baba ganoush is the default way to use an eggplant. And maybe it is.

What exactly distinguishes baba ganoush is up for debate. The Guardian published a piece breaking down all the ingredient possibilities, such as tahini, yogurt, parsley, mint, cumin, and pomegranate. “Is this delicious smoky dip the ultimate aubergine recipe?” the author Felicity Cloake asks. If you’re asking in a headline, the answer is probably: probably.

In any case, the ultimate eggplant recipe is definitely not this, according to the internet. Maybe because, compared to baba ganoush, it’s a lot simpler. There aren’t a lot of possibilities. There isn’t tahini to make it creamy and rich. There’s just smoky eggplant, unapologetically raw onion, and a modest amount of olive oil. It sounds boring from afar.

So why not change it? Increase the olive oil. Caramelize the onions. Add mashed anchovies. Add lemon zest. Add paprika. Add all the fresh herbs! But I never thought to do any of this. And I should have, right? It’s my literal job to develop recipes.

By definition, develop means “cause to grow and become more mature, advanced, or elaborate.” In other words, I loved the chocolate-peanut butter cookies my mom made growing up, but I wanted them to be fudgier and less sweet and saltier. I always asked for second helpings of our go-to tomato-saucy brisket, but this year, I wanted to find out what would happen if I braised it in milk instead.

So what makes this recipe the exception? I wish I had a meaningful answer. Something like: Because Anna leaving Romania was the start of my family’s life in America, the start of my life in America, preserving the way she prepared this dish is preserving my ancestors’ memory, my family history, my truest identity.

But it isn’t like that. I just think her eggplant tastes really, really good, exactly as it is.

Even when you try to keep something the same, it changes. When I asked Grandma if she adjusted the recipe at all, she told me, “I try to make it just like she did.” But then, when she started listing the details, there were discrepancies: a green bell pepper when I’ve always used yellow, a pinch of sugar which I had never seen anyone add.

“Just a little!” Grandma explained. “Because eggplants can be bitter.”

Or they used to be. These days, not as much, just like certain cuts of pork used to be fatty but now are lean. Ingredients aren’t the same as they were 130-something years ago. Which means recipes can’t be either.

Of course, this doesn’t explain the green bell pepper morphing into yellow. But I can explain that: my mom. She hates green bell peppers. She also loves Fuchsia Dunlop. (It’ll make sense in a second, I swear.) Fuchsia Dunlop is an English cookbook author who specializes in Chinese cuisine. In 2013, she published a book called Every Grain of Rice that I couldn’t stop cooking from. So I recommended it to my mom and then she couldn’t stop cooking from it.

In Every Grain of Rice, there’s a recipe for Smoky Eggplant With Garlic. Dunlop writes: “The smoky flavor of charred eggplant is the soul of Middle Eastern baba ganoush and it’s also used in this Sichuanese appetizer.” Instead of onion, there are scallions. Instead of olive oil, chili oil. Instead of red wine vinegar, Chinkiang vinegar.

It tastes good. But it also tastes different. Whenever my mom makes eggplant spread nowadays, she makes it like Fuchsia. And just like that, over a century after Anna left Romania, our family’s go-to eggplant recipe is changed.

Or it’s always been changing. I’m a culprit of that, too. If there were one constant between Anna’s version and ours, it’s the lack of a recipe. Until now. This is the first time I’ve ever seen our version written down, so the odds that it’s exactly like Anna made it aren’t just improbable. They’re impossible. Even she didn’t make it the same every time.

So I guess my recipe developing did get in the way after all. I felt the need to document something that was always just a conversation between generations, relatives spoon-feeding each other, asking, “What else does it need? More olive oil? More salt?”

It always needs more olive oil. It always needs more salt. But eventually, there’s a look in the other person’s eyes, whether they’re my grandmother’s or my mother’s or my own, a look that says, "Yes. Yes, that’s it! That’s what I remember."