Melanzane alla parmigiana Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Melanzane alla parmigiana is a home-style dish of Naples and the wider Italian south: thin slices of eggplant, fried and stacked in layers with tomato sauce, melting cheese, and grated Parmesan, then baked. In time it spread across the country as a national favorite.

Its two leading players are eggplant and tomato. Eggplant was long at home in this soil, an old vegetable carried into southern Italy and Sicily by way of the Arabs during the Middle Ages and woven into Mediterranean cooking well before this dish took shape. The tomato was the newcomer, brought from the New World across the Atlantic, and it settled as food in the fields and pots of the south during the eighteenth century. The tomato-sauced parmigiana we know today followed once that fruit had taken root.

The cookbooks trace the change. In the 1780s, Vincenzo Corrado's Il cuoco galante gives a forerunner recipe of eggplant and Parmesan with no tomato at all. Half a century later, around 1837, Ippolito Cavalcanti's Cucina teorico-pratica, written in Naples, shows the dish in its present form, with layers of tomato sauce and Parmesan. That date of 1837 is the earliest record we can point to by name, not the year the dish was born. Its outline had been forming earlier, slowly, in the kitchens of Naples and Campania.

The name parmigiana calls the city of Parma to mind. Yet its origin remains unsettled, with three explanations still standing side by side.

The first ties it to Parmesan cheese, grated over the top, or to alla parmigiana in the sense of a Parma manner of layering vegetables. Dictionaries tend to prefer this reading. But it sits awkwardly with the dish itself. Melanzane alla parmigiana belongs to the southern regions of Campania and Sicily, and in northern Italy, where Parma lies, it was hardly eaten at all. Because the geography of the dish and the supposed birthplace do not match, food historians are skeptical of pinning its origin on Parma (the culinary-history piece in La Cucina Italiana).

The second traces the name to the Sicilian dialect word parmiciana, the overlapping wooden slats of a shutter. Fried eggplant, laid down in slightly staggered, overlapping layers, resembles those slats. Pointing to how eggplant took root in southern Italy and Sicily through the Arabs, and to the dish's concentration in the south, food writers such as Mary Taylor Simeti and Vincent Schiavelli favor this account. It stands as the strong rival to the Parma reading.

A third view, found in other sources, derives the name from the Persian word for eggplant.

Which is right has not been decided, and this article crowns none of them. The name stays unfixed, while the dish itself is plain enough: an eggplant bake that took its shape in southern Italy after the tomato had settled in.