Smoky Eggplant Salad

This eggplant salad can be found all the way across the Middle East to India. The seasonings might be different, but the idea is the same. The Parsi version, in keeping with our love for sweet things in savory guises, uses sugar, which I consider optional.

About ten years ago, when I was at lunch at an old friend’s house in Bombay, she introduced me to this dazzling technique of smoking the salad after it was fully assembled, rather than roasting the eggplants over coals to char the