Fried Eggplant with Sugar

This Sephardic dish from Edirne, in Turkey, is of Hispano-Arabic origin. The giveaway is the sprinkling of sugar on the fried eggplant. Some recipes direct you to salt the eggplant or soak it in salted water for 10 to 15 minutes, then squeeze it dry before dipping it in the egg and frying it. Claudia Roden believes that no soaking is needed if you dip the slices in egg before frying. The recipe also appears in La table juive as a Rosh Hashanah dish. What is unusual in this recipe is