Eggplant Imam Bayildi

Preparation info
  • Serves

    6

    as an appetizer
    • Difficulty

      Medium

Appears in
A Canon of Vegetables

By Raymond Sokolov

Published 2007

  • About

This is the most famous of all eggplant dishes. It is also the only recipe of any kind whose name is a sentence. Imam bayildi means “The imam fainted.” The traditional explanation for it is that some imam fainted from pleasure when he tasted this oil-drenched eggplant concoction. To a turcophone reader, there is nothing odd about the verb bayildi, the third-person singular preterite of the verb “to faint”: bayilmak. But to non-Turks, especially those wanting to spell