RATATOUILLE

Even the humblest onion is transformed into something glorious in ratatouille (rat-ta-TŌŌ-ee), a one-pot wonder, a jewel of Provençal cooking, and an easy-to-master minimally stewed beauty.

Illustration: Disney Pixar Creative Studios. Anton Ego, the most powerful food critic in Paris in Ratatouille, the 2007 Disney Pixar hit movie, could make or break a restaurant with a single review. The sight of his dour, colorless, unsmiling face struck fear into the heart of even the most successful of culinary celebrities.

When Ratatouille was released in 2007, an article appeared on the food pages of the Knoxville News-Sentinel, featuring a recipe and a glorious photo of a fancy version of the dish. That powerful image has been embedded within me for 17 years. I’ve only made ratatouille a couple times but this concoction has always symbolized one of the glories of home cooking. Maybe it’s because the ingredients, namely the last taste of summer that begins with vine-ripened tomatoes in their high season. Followed by mountains of squash, eggplant, onions and peppers. They all sing their loudest tunes of their flavors heading into the fall. Plus, by using some of the techniques of French cooking, their deepest flavors can be coaxed out of these vegetables. Make a batch big enough to eat for days. I did just this week and it tasted better on the third day. Freeze some, if you can. I couldn’t bring myself to. One of my favorite chefs, Thomas Keller, of The French Laundry and Per Se, consulted on the movie so I was bound to have a hankering for it. Just to see how some top food writers make this classic, in addition to Melissa Clark, whose recipe I adapted here, I searched out the approaches of Alexander Lobrano, Bill Buford, and Adam Byatt. Each has his own particular take.

INGREDIENTS

Yield: 4 to 5 servings

• 3 garlic cloves

• 2 medium white onions

• 2 medium zucchini

• 2 Japanese eggplant

• 2 bell peppers

• 3 sprigs fresh rosemary

• 6 sprigs fresh thyme

• 1 cup olive oil

• 2 large Cherokee Black or Cherokee Purple tomatoes, if you can find them

• 1 bay leaf

• 1 tsp fine sea salt

• Freshly ground black pepper

  PREPARATION

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees.

  2. Smash and peel 2 garlic cloves. Halve onions and slice halves into ¼-inch-thick pieces. Slice zucchini into ¼-inch-thick rounds. Cut eggplant into 1-inch cubes or spears. Seed peppers, and cut them into ¼-inch-thick strips.

  3. Spread each vegetable separately on baking sheet pans. Add the 2 cloves of garlic to the onions. Add 1 sprig rosemary and 2 sprigs thyme to each of the pepper, eggplant and zucchini baking sheets. Sprinkle salt lightly over vegetables. Drizzle 2 Tbsp olive oil on each of the pans.

4. Cook until vegetables are very tender and lightly browned at the edges: about 40 minutes for the peppers; 45 minutes for the eggplant and zucchini; and 60 minutes for the onions. Turn over vegetables every 15 minutes with a spatula.

5. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add tomatoes and blanch until the skins split, about 10 seconds. Quickly transfer the tomatoes to a bowl filled with ice water.

6. Peel the cooled tomatoes with a paring knife. Halve tomatoes. Set a sieve over a bowl. Working over the bowl, seed the tomatoes, letting juice run into the bowl. Discard seeds but save juices. Dice tomatoes and add to the reserved juices in bowl.

7. Mince remaining garlic clove and add to tomatoes along with bay leaf and a large pinch of salt.

8. Once vegetables are done, combine them on one baking sheet or a large shallow baking dish and add ingredients from tomato bowl. Toss well. Cover generously with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Everything should have a good coat of oil, but should not be drowning in it.

9. Cook 1 hour or more, stirring every 15 minutes, until vegetables are very tender. Add salt and pepper to taste, then serve warm or cool or save until later.

[Recipe adapted from Melissa Clark, The New York Times, November 20, 2023. Her recipe includes a brief history of the dish, equipment you’ll need to prepare it, choosing and preparing the vegetables, plus techniques and tips. Clark is a food reporter and columnist for NYT and NYT Cooking and she’s written dozens of cookbooks. ​The French do have a genius for cooking with vegetables and this recipe is part of The New Essentials of French Cooking, the 10 definitive dishes every modern cook should master.]

ALEXANDER LOBRANO

Photo: Jenny Huang, WSJ; Food, Tyna Hoang; Props, Sophie Strangio

Take the best summer vegetables, toss in some olive oil, herbs and spices, let it basically cook itself. A writer living in France plots the evolution of his go-to ratatouille.

By Alexander Lobrano, The Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2021

“It was ratatouille, the southern-French compote of eggplant, tomatoes, zucchini, onions and peppers, that taught me the meaning of “umami.” I didn’t know the word as a 10-year-old first encountering the dish, but when I came across it years later and had to look it up, I thought: That’s ratatouille, a deeply ruddy alloy of flavors fused together to become something irresistible. I will always remember the first time I tried ratatouille, on a muggy July night, on the side of a crab-grass-covered hill overlooking Burial Hill beach on the littoral of Long Island Sound, in Greens Farms, Conn. The dark sky erupted in red comets and golden blossoms; I winced each time, waiting to feel the fireworks’ explosion in my rib cage. I got an occasional whiff of gunpowder, but, more than anything, the lazy, briny breeze brought the scent of charred meat from a dozen barbecues. More exciting, however, was discovering the contents of the Birkbee family’s woven-spruce picnic basket. The object itself was alluring, solid and so tidy. Inside was real silverware rolled in napkins of the red-and-white check fabric I would later associate with Paris bistros . . . .

“My version is a little unorthodox. Rather than frying the vegetables—traditional for this dish—I oven-roast them, following the lead of the British food writer Elizabeth David. At the suggestion of Yoyo, the lovely woman who runs the farm where I buy vegetables near my house in Blauzac, in the south of France, I add coarsely ground coriander seeds to provide an occasional burst of sweet, resinous flavor.

“I love freshly made ratatouille, served lukewarm, but I may love it even more during the days that follow. It’s the very best summer-cooking cheat I’ve found. I toss it with pasta and salted capers or slivered caper berries rinsed in cold water. I use it to garnish salmon, mix it into couscous salad with fresh mint, and tuck a spoonful into an omelet with a knob of chèvre or some grated Gruyère. The happiest and most forgiving Mediterranean muddle, it always lights up a table.”

[Alexander Lobrano’s memoir, “My Place at the Table,” was published by Mariner Books.]

BILL BUFORD

Photo, The New Yorker. Bill Buford, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker, is the author of “Heat,” and “Dirt.”

The French Secret to Ratatouille, A Last Taste Of Summer

By Bill Buford, The New Yorker, October 9, 2020

“Ratatouille: the word evokes French vegetables, meatless health, sunshine, and a jolly Pixar film that, for about six months, my young twin sons watched, seated at the kitchen table, while waiting for their dinner. The word also evokes memories of disappointment. I’ve always loved the idea of the dish but was never thrilled with what I made, and eventually I stopped trying. That was before I learned three essential ratatouille principles, which were proffered—very casually—when I was helping out in a French kitchen, and which changed my approach irrevocably.

“The kitchen was at Citronelle, the Washington, D.C., restaurant run by the great Michel Richard. The executive chef, David Deshaies, was showing me how to prepare ratatouille. “It is made with the five vegetables that every family can grow in its home garden,” he said—nothing exotic, nothing hard to find (essential principle No. 1). He then counted them off, on his fingers: ‘Eggplant, red peppers, onions, tomatoes, and zucchini.’ (Plus garlic, which somehow is never treated as a sixth ingredient, even though no ratatouille can be made without it.) I remembered Deshaies’s point several years later, when I found myself, on an early-autumn day, in the Alpine village of Lanslebourg, overlooking a river and a row of domestic gardens. There they were, in leafy abundance: all five ingredients, in their end-of-summer ratatouille bounty . . . .

“The quantities are roughly equal (essential principle No. 2), a matter of eyeball judgment rather than weighing on a scale, since the onions are dense, tomatoes fairly weighty, zucchini less so, peppers hollow, and eggplants only marginally heavier than air. In an equally casual spirit, they are cut up in chunks: i.e., no fine dice. ‘We once made a nouvelle-cuisine version, with small and perfect cubes,” Richard said, watching David and me. ‘But it was too fancy. Ratatouille is a rustic dish . . . .

“Most importantly (principle No. 3), the ingredients are cooked separately—never in the same pan. ‘What you want is vegetable jam,’ Deshaies said. I thought, Who wouldn’t want that?

“In Richard’s kitchen, the onions, eggplants, and zucchini were sautéed in olive oil, one after the other. The peppers were cooked, on a tray, in a hot oven. The tomatoes were the most involved. First, they were skinned in accordance with a particular French practice involving two baths of water, one just-boiled and the other iced. (‘The French never eat the skin. It comes out in your poop!’ Richard told me confidently. ) The naked tomatoes were then cut into quarters. The juices and drippy, jellylike seeds got scooped out and dropped into a sieve atop a bowl, producing, by the end of the session, a formidably goopy, splashy pond of tomato water. (This was for later, to be added when completing the ratatouille, a magic hydrating element.) The tomato quarters, meanwhile, now looking like red flower petals, were arranged on a baking sheet, painted with olive oil, sprinkled with salt and sugar, and roasted at a low heat until they were plump and swollen. They are the jammiest of the jammy ingredients . . . .

“It was only then that I realized how important the cook-things-separately approach is in French cooking. Even vignerons, when bottling a wine made of different grape varieties, can either toss everything in a vat together and ferment the lot (creating what is sometimes known as a “field blend”) or vinify each one separately and blend at the end, producing a more controlled product in which you can often taste each grape. And many famous French stews turn out—at least in their classic, cheffy version—to be minimally stewed . . . .”

[Bill Buford, a former fiction editor at The New Yorker, is the author of “Heat,” and “Dirt.”]

ADAM BYATT

Adam Byatt is the head chef and owner of the Michelin-starred Trinity restaurant, Upstairs at Trinity and Bistro Union, in Clapham, London.

By cooking all the vegetables at the same time and packing them tightly in a precise order, the flavours melt together, making a perfect side or main dish.

Adam Byatt, The Guardian, February 20, 2019

“I wanted to create a ratatouille that wasn’t diced, stewed together and sloppy. This method allows all of the vegetables to cook at the same time and melt into each other. It’s a perfect accompaniment to Mediterranean fish, and showcases the best vegetables, though I often have it as a main on its own . . . .”

[Adam Byatt is the head chef and owner of the Michelin-starred Trinity restaurant, Upstairs at Trinity and Bistro Union, in Clapham, London]

---