An Unexpected Hankering for Eggplant Soup

An easy, creamy farewell to summer — enriched with walnuts

Early this week I found myself alone in the kitchen with an eggplant, having realized as I was lugging it home that I hadn’t cooked eggplant once this summer. That needed to be remedied.

Typically with eggplant I go the dip (one of my favorites in Start Simple is the eggplant dip with seared scallions, page 83), pasta, or ratatouille route, but on this day I was inclined towards soup. But why, I wondered, didn’t eggplant soup seem more intuitive and familiar to me?

I pored through my cookbooks (lots of eggplant stews) and did some online research (there are indeed eggplant soup traditions in Turkey, Iran, elsewhere in the Middle East, and surely other places) — but nothing quite in line with what I was imagining came up.

Given its mellow flavor, high water content, and how it welcomes pureed treatments, I’d think that eggplant soup would be pretty common this time of year. Is eggplant soup in you repertoire? If so, I’d very love to hear more.

My vision was to play on eggplant’s affinity for walnuts, and to bypass using stock or broth (I wanted to be able to serve this cold or at room temperature — and I have irrational dislike for cold broth). So I turned to a method used in my Creamed Hazelnut and Mushroom Soup, building nut milk into the recipe.