A little slice of heavenly toast
Mention the avocadotoast craze to a French person, and you’ll get a Gallic shrug. Although that shrug is generally a nuanced gesture with myriad meanings, the translation of the toast shrug is: What’s the big deal?
Long before hip, smallplates restaurants and hole-in-the-wall diners were topping toasts with smashed avocado, olive-oil drizzled ricotta, squash roasted with maple syrup or anything with tahini, the French were eating tartines. Like toasts, tartines are a one-slice affair, an open-faced sandwich, a single piece of bread that accepts everything as a topping, including scrambled eggs, aged cheese and truffles. And, yes, you can top a slab of country bread with avocado.
The other day in Paris, I topped my tartine with a type of eggplant caviar, the French name for a mash of eggplant, herbs and spices (like baba ghanouj). It wasn’t what I had set out to do, but having done it, I liked it so much that I did it again.
I had roasted two eggplants and set them aside to turn them into one of several mezze plates that I had planned to serve as the starter for a Mediterranean-inspired dinner. And then the dinner got canceled: I came down with
(like everyone else). All bets were off.
All except whatever I was going to do with the eggplants, roasted, burnished, appropriately shriveled and resting in a speckled enamel pan. Doing my best to channel Yotam Ottolenghi, who makes miraculous things with eggplants, I created this silken spread, flavored with tahini (natch), pomegranate molasses (a new must-have in my house), ground sumac, onion and a hypergenerous amount of chopped ginger. To anyone who says that eggplant is undistinguished (the polite way to say that its flavor can be muddy), I say, taste this: The ginger is transformative.
As for the tartine, I built it from ingredients I’d intended to use for the ill-fated dinner. The base was a thick slice of olive oil-moistened sourdough bread (thicker than most French people would consider for a tartine) and then, for surprise and crunch, some paper-thin slices of pear to support a hearty layer of the eggplant spread. I finished the dish with slivers of onions and radishes, pomegranate seeds and soft lettuce. It was gorgeous. It was more Israel than Eiffel Tower. It was a winner.
I like to think of the accompanying recipe as a rough construction plan, a sketch for a tartine you can play with. And when you’ve had your fun tartine-ing, just scrape the eggplant into a bowl, grab some crackers and call it a dip.