I can't believe they're not meatballs: pitticelle.

Yesterday night we had one of my co-workers over at dinner. Having guests is always nice, OK almost always, especially when they're people you can spend a nice evening talking openly with no worries on your mind. Also it gives me the chance to play Chef a bit. Don't we all love to impress guests with our culinary skills :-)? Since our guest tonight is an ovo-lacto vegetarian meat was out of question. Not a big problem: I like cooking vegetables, although the choice in winter is quite reduced here in Germany.
Southern Italian cooking comes always to help in these cases. Since people there were too poor to afford meat, on a daily basis, they came up with really cool ideas for vegetables. One of those is aubergine... meatballs... uhm... let's say aubergine dumpling. These come from Calabria (the point of the boot if you look at Italy) and are locally called pitticelle di murignani.

I really like this recipe because, first of all, it uses aubergines, one of my favourite vegetables. It is also a quite funny/cool dish, because once pan-fried these dumplings look very much like meatballs. The reactions of the vegetarians I've served them to was always: "Are those MEATBALLS????"". The similarity ends there though, they taste definitely of aubergine and have a much smoother texture than meatballs.

To make them I used:
3 medium aubergines
1 egg
bread crumbs
2-3 Tbs grated caciocavallo (pecorino or old provolone make a good substitute), optional
1 Tbs finely chopped fresh oregano (dried is fine although it tastes slightly different)
1/2 scamorza cheese or same amount of young provolone, cut into small cubes.
flour

First of all I cooked the aubergines: traditionally they would be boiled, but i find that makes the aubergine flesh too watery. Therefore I prefer to bake the aubergines in the oven, whole, at 180C/3590F for about 1 hour, after punching some holes in their skin with a fork. When the skin turns black they're ready. I peeled them and finely chopped the aubergine flesh (actually this time I used my food processor), then added egg, oregano, caciocavallo salt and pepper. The caciocavallo is not necessary but I like to include when the aubergines are not summer-sun ripe. I find that aubergines in other times of the year miss that certain peppery taste, caciocavallo or pecorino manage to add a similar note to the pitticelle. I mixed all well together with some bread crumbs: the amount varies greatly, I added some till the mass became a dry-ish soft "dough". I shaped the pitticelle into small fat ovals, taking 2 Tbs of the "dough" and enclosing them around a scamorza cube and them dredging them in a bit of flour. I pan fried them but they could also be oven baked.

We ate them as a main course with some salad but I find they're nicer as appetiser, maybe with some fresh herbed yoghurt.

Comments

[clotilde]

Alberto, this looks excellent! The only thing I love more than eggplants is eggplants with cheese, so this looks like something I have to try!

Is there an explanation behind the name "pitticelle"? Does it mean anything - other than eggplant meatballs?

[Deb]

Alberto-
This looks delicious. I've never seen this type of dish before. I'll have to give this a try. My mother and family came to the U.S. from Sicily in 1952 but she never took a liking to cooking, heh. I inherited my interest in cooking from Nonna, but she never made this dish before either. I'll have to scold her for holding out on me. It's amazing, it really does look like meat!

[Alberto]

Clotilde,

pitticelle is a general term for pan fried dumplings/balls (don't know the proper term in English). They're either made froma aubergines or with "rosamarina" a fish preserve consisting of very small fishes, rossetti (not baby fishes), and chili paste (Calabrian cusine is quite fiery). I don't know if the term has another meaning too. Italian dialects vary greatly even between relatively near cities. The only dialect I more or less understand is the one from Naples.

[Alberto]

Deb,

I don't think your Nonna hold out on you. Although Sicilian and Calabrese cooking have a few common point this is limited to southern Calabria. This recipe comes from the northern part of the region and therefore your Nonna probably did not know about it.