Hare Krishna! I was wondering if you can tell me where I can find the recipe for the dish on the cover of your cookbook Great Vegetarian Dishes.
It looks like eggplant and curd cheese, but I cannot find it in the cookbook! Thank you.
              Kelly Sadowski, Sayreville, New Jersey, USA

Hi Kelly,
Hare Krishna to you! Thanks for the letter. You are right in guessing that the front cover pic of Great Vegetarian Dishes is eggplant and panir cheese. And yes, there is no recipe. At least, not published. On the last day of shooting the photos for the book (way back in 1990) we still had no front cover shot, so we made one up on the spot. The recipe tasted great, but I never got around to publishing it. By the way the book was styled by Melbourne stylist Maureen McKeon, and the great photos were taken by Melbourne food photographer Peter Bailey.

Here are the ingredients and a rough recipe.

I heated a few teaspoons olive oil, and fried half a teaspoon mustard seeds, pinch of asafetida and a teaspoon cumin seeds until aromatic. I added a couple of cups of tomato puree, half a teaspoon turmeric, a teaspoon coriander powder, a little sugar and salt, and cooked it down until it was quite thick and saucy.

Meanwhile I steamed some whole baby green stringless beans, and put them aside.

Next, I took some panir cheese (click here for the recipe), sliced it into thin squares, and pan-fried it until golden brown.

Then I cut some eggplant slices, rubbed them with a mixture of salt and turmeric, and shallow-fried them in ghee until tender. By the way, these eggplant slices are a very popular Bengali entree, served piping hot.

Finally , I combined the tomato sauce, beans and panir and layered it onto the fried eggplant slices.

That's it! They were delicious as I recall, but I've never made them since. Now at last they are immortalised in print.

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