Nick Bramham's Caponata for All Seasons
An essay on the principles of caponata, and a recipe for pumpkin (or squash) caponata. Text and photographs by Nick Bramham.
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Welcome to Vittles Recipes! In this new weekly slot, our roster of six rotating columnists will share their recipes and wisdom with you. This week’s columnist is Nick Bramham. You can read our archive of cookery writing here.
Nick Bramham's Caponata for All Seasons
An essay on the principles of caponata, and a recipe for pumpkin (or squash) caponata. Text and photographs by Nick Bramham.
Caponata is a kaleidoscopic tangle of fried vegetables spiked with pine nuts, raisins, olives and vinegar that can confidently claim being Sicily’s signature dish, so evocative is it of long, sunny lunches on the Mediterranean’s most piquant island. Typically, the dish showcases aubergines, courgettes, and tomatoes (a savvy way of using up the glut of summer bounty), but there is a wide variety of styles, with no two caponatas being quite the same despite their shared fundamental ingredients.
The spectrum is incredibly broad. On the one end is something resembling a Provençal vegetable stew, like a sweet-and-sour ratatouille, with slow-cooked vegetables collapsing into one another, bound by a thick tomato sauce, the flavours deeply enmeshed and pleasingly homogeneous. At the other extreme is a dish more akin to the type of pickle plate you might have been served in a fashionable East London wine bar in the mid 2010s, the respective vegetables cooked separately or hardly at all, barely touching and coolly clinging to their own identity – texturally interesting, with prominent and distinct flavours, but not exactly what you would call a complete dish.
I like to find a happy medium somewhere between these two poles. For me, certain vegetables work best when deep-fried, whereas others should be slowly simmered in olive oil. I add the vegetables to the pot in stages to control their eventual level of doneness relative to that of the other ingredients. This approach results in flavours and textures that, while clearly defined, coalesce into a whole that’s absolutely greater than the sum of its parts, bound by the vegetables’ collective juices, good olive oil, and that distinctly Sicilian quality brought by the vinegar and sugar: agrodolce (‘agro’ means sour, while ‘dolce’ means sweet).
Something I learned to appreciate only recently was that caponata can be made year-round. After all, the ingredients that give the dish its essential caponata-ness are all preserves of some sort: olive oil, vinegar, sugar, pine nuts, olives and raisins. And it has always been my preference to use sun-dried tomatoes, leaning into their umami quality and supple texture, over fresh or canned ones. When you have these core constituents providing the base, you can use whichever seasonally appropriate vegetables you have to orient the dish in place and time — I’ve seen caponatas made almost entirely of artichokes, and others that celebrate celery.
My new favourite version utilises good quality pumpkin or squash – which are both denser and sweeter than aubergine – and offer a more interesting contrast to the other ingredients. Plus, they’re available from autumn right through the beginning of spring (although the growing season tapers off in December, the best growers ‘cure’ their harvested pumpkins and carefully store them at ambient temperatures for a few months, which improves their texture and flavour).
While sometimes playing second fiddle as a garnish for meat and fish dishes, I think caponata deserves to be the headline act. It should ideally be accompanied by nothing more than a big chunk of focaccia and perhaps some fresh sheep’s ricotta that hasn’t seen the inside of a fridge – but really, any decent bread and soft cheese will do (buffalo mozzarella and burrata work particularly well). Or, if you really want to push the boat out and go for a full-on, transportive Sicilian fantasy feast, then a table heaving with Nebrodi salami, hard-boiled eggs, sardines a beccafico, freshly fried panelle, and several bottles of cool Etna Rosso – with the caponata front and centre, of course – would be quite nice.
Can I come?
Pumpkin (or squash) caponata
