This is the 1930's ratatouille recipe Bob Henrick referred to in another thread. I originally posted it in 2001 just after reading MFK Fisher's book Long Ago in France, and it's so lovely it deserves re-reading by those who saw it then and the new acquaintance fo those who didn't.
This recipe was part of the very last chapter of the book where she describes moving into their first apartment and really having to learn to cook for the first time in her life. As she described it in her inimitable style, "It was the first real day-to-day meal-after-meal cooking I had ever done, and it was only a little less complicated than performing an appendectomy on a life raft but after I got used to hauling water and putting together three-courses on a table the size of a bandana, and lighting the portable stove without blowing myself clear into the living room instead of only halfway, it was fun."
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Every couple of pages in the book, "Long Ago in France" by MFK Fisher, is another gem that makes me want to pick up the phone and call a foodie friend or a traveling friend or a literary friend or even just a girlfriend, because Ms. Fisher writes about some very personal experiences. A gem of the foodie kind is the following recipe for ratatouille which will obviously result in nothing like what I know to be ratatouille. Before many more days go by, I will have attempted this myself, but now I post an excerpt containing the recipe for the pleasure of my friends here.
"I learned to make ratatouille from a large strong woman, a refugee, not political but economic, from an island off Spain: There was not enough food to go around in her family, and she and her husband weree the sturdies, so they got out. They ran a vegetable store with one little window and almost no space....She was a great big beautiful woman: coal-black hair, big black eyes, but a very big grossly overweight body. I do not know how she squeezed through that little square hole. She and her tiny husband evidently slept, ate, lived down there.
"She taught me more than her stew, without knowing that I often pondered on how she washed her gleaming hair and stayed generally so sweet smelling, when it was plain that both she and the lettuces must bathe at the public pump and sleep in the dark cellar or under the little counter. She cooked on a gas ring behind a curtain at the back of the store, and that is how I came to ask her questions, because her stew had such a fine smell. She looked at me as if I were almost as ignorant as I was, and after my first lesson from her I bought a big earthenware pot, which I still use.
"The first ingredients were and still are eggplant and onions, garlic, green peppers, red peppers, plenty of ripe peeled tomatoes and some good olive oil. Proportions are imossible to fix firmly, since everything changes in size and flavor, but perhaps there should be three parts of eggplant to two of tomatoes and one each of the peppers and the onions and garlic. I really cannot say.
"Everything is sliced, cubed, chopped, minced, and, except for the tomatoes, is put into the pot...thrown in, that is, for the rough treatment pushes down the mass. At the end, when there is less than no room, the tomatoes are cubed or sliced gbenerously across the top, and the lid is pressed down ruthlessly. When it is taken off, a generous amount of olive oil must be trickled over the whole to seep down. Then the lid is put on again. It may not quite fit, but it will soon drop into place. The whole goes into a gentle (300 degree) oven for about as long as one wishes to leave it theere, like five or six hours. It shoudl be stirred up from the bottom with a long spoon every couple of hours. It will be very soupy for a time, and then is when it makes a delicious nourishing meal served generously over slices of toasted french bread with plenty of grated dry cheese. Gradually it becomes more solid, as the air fills with the rich waftings which make neighbors sniff and smile. When it reaches the right texture to be eaten as one wishes, even with a fork, the lid can stay off and fresh shelled shrimps be laid amply on the top to turn white before they are stirred in, or small sausages already cooked well in beer or wine. Or it can simply be left in a turned-off oven to be chilled later for probably the best so-called ratatouille ever eaten."
