Baba Ghannooge

Roasting eggplant over an open flame is essential to the proper smoky flavor of the ultimate puree. Spongy eggplant flesh absorbs the flavor and the oil of the tahini, that sesame-seed paste typical of Arab cooking. The result is one of those great prescientific human discoveries we owe to experimental cooks who took what they could from plundering armies. The advancing Arabs brought eggplant from the East, then some genius realized that eggplant would meld perfectly with another unlikely e