Some say it was the exquisite taste of the food that did the man in, while others blame the liberal use of expensive olive oil. My own opinion hovers toward taste as the main culprit because I love this dish and I can’t imagine my silk-clad imam as a mean, tight-fisted Ottoman Grinch swooning over the liberal use of olive oil. Besides, there’s something special about barely fried eggplant baked slowly with onions, garlic and tomatoes until it’s as soft as pillows, then piled high on a plate with thick yogurt and a hunk of thick-crusted bread. The bread is my own preference, but I know for a fact the imam would have been served buttered rice.

That’s how I had it the first time, on the sunny front porch of a little house, surrounded by endless acres of grapevines and gardens, not too far from the sea. We — my mother and I — had come to buy fruits and vegetables, a trip most city dwellers in Romania pulled every fall at least once. There were shortages in the city, the supply that reached the state stores was never enough, and it was never the quality produce that we could get directly from the village.

Our host and his wife tended a garden year-round, and in the fall they sold to a few select and lucky clients. We walked the garden and picked everything we wanted and my mother paid them. She didn’t haggle or try to get the price down in any way. How could she? The food we were buying was absolutely luscious, the tomatoes still had the smell of sun and earth about them, and the grapes were as big as my thumbs and covered with a fine bluish dust. Our host showed me how to rub a grape until it shined purple and then pop it in my mouth and make a wish. I did like he told me; the grape was sweet and warm and my wish had something to do with a boy.

Their house was small and pleasant. The “good room” had thick carpets covering every inch of floor and wall, two sofas drowned in silk pillows, and a curio cabinet filled with cut crystal and a large doll in a shiny wedding dress whose main function, attained sometime in the 1960s, was to sit on the hood of the car, a good-luck ornament at their wedding. There were pictures — weddings and children — but now it was just the two of them, middle-aged and happy. And of course, their swoon-worthy eggplant dish.

In the shade of their creaky porch I had watched my mother eat the way I’ve never seen her do before: slowly and thoughtfully, with infinite delight. Normally, she professed utter indifference to gourmet pleasures, hell-bent as she was on making sure her waist stayed at a natural 22 inches — her size before she had me. Yet here she was, absolutely enthralled by the food on her plate. Our hosts, both sweet and spherical, smiled with glee.

“The imam has fainted,” the man said and his wife giggled pleasantly.

It seemed to me my mother could pass out too. She looked congested, and she was still eating. I think she stopped a second before bursting.

Of course she begged for the recipe, and she learned how to make it. The recipe morphed and changed as she went through life and changed herself. For a while it was mushrooms. Then my mother decided she liked chestnuts and baby corn in her iman bayildi. A couple of years ago it got a habañero pepper, seared, skinned and seeded, and a side of tortilla chips. The imam turned in his grave, but she wasn’t finished. The “bayildi” acquired a sprinkling of cilantro, a dash of ponzu sauce, and shavings of ginger. I shudder to think what’s next.

I cook the dish too, but I don’t tinker with it; the original iman bayildi is my bridge to a perfect sun-drenched afternoon, and a late lunch surrounded by acres of grapevines and vegetable gardens.

At my house this dish starts with the clatter of at least three frying pans, and a glass of wine for the cook (me). Sometimes, if there’s a bit of wine left in the bottle, it goes into the dish. The recipe doesn’t call for it. The better the wine, the less chance it has to make it into the pan.

There’s no dicing, pounding, straining, mixing or chopping for imam bayildi. Everything’s peeled, sliced and lightly fried in olive oil, then artistically arranged in a baking dish and left in the oven for about 50 minutes.

Imam Bayildi

Needless to say, we’d get soaking wet in no time at all. Eventually, we’d be coaxed inside with promises of pakoras, savory fritters made with a chickpea flour batter, and some ginger-cardamom chai. It takes great willpower to just have one or two pakoras; what usually starts off as a snack turns into a meal, ending with improvised sandwiches of bread slathered with mint-cilantro chutney and filled with the remaining pakoras. These fritters are not only good for a rainy day, but make a great snack any day, any time.

For lunch today, my family and I indulged in pakoras as we watched the liquid Oregon sunshine through the windows. With a hot cup of ginger chai tea, it was the perfect Sunday indulgence.

Here is a simple recipe to try. To make it easier, I’ve made many spices optional. No need to fret if you don’t have them all on hand. The chickpea flour is available in many ethnic stores.

Pakoras: Indian-style fritters

Serves 6-8

Notes:

• Please use caution when frying and working with hot oil, taking care not to splash or drop the food from a height into the oil. Instead lower it in carefully, as close to the surface of the oil as possible.
• You may need to play with the temperature of the oil by turning the heat up or down a few times during the frying process. You want the fritters to bubble on contact with the oil, but not fry dark brown too quickly.
• To reheat, place in a single layer on a cookie sheet and bake in a preheated 350°F oven for 10 to 15 minutes. They will crisp up again very nicely.
• Any leftover batter will keep in the refrigerator for a few days. 

In my mind, no dish better encapsulates the experience of Roman cuisine than Spaghetti alla Carbonara — the Roman charcoal industry’s gift to the world. As the story I’ve been told goes, the charcoal sellers lived in the towns in the hills of Lazio outside Rome, cutting wood and charring it before carrying it in sacks down to the city to sell. The work was almost unbearably physical, and demanded hearty food to keep up one’s energy — hence, the birth of this almost unbearably rich pasta dish.

How much of that is truth and how much the product of the Roman love for poetic fabrication I don’t know, but whatever its history, it’s my favorite meal on Earth, a marker of important events in the same way that others use champagne or cigars. When served, conversation around the table ceases, replaced by moans and grunting. It’s a pleasure too good to ever be called guilty.

A note on ingredients: I call for pancetta, an air-cured Italian pork belly that’s a cousin to bacon. I love its chewy sweet-saltiness, but most Romans would insist that you use guanciale, cured pork cheek, whose soft, buttery unctuousness produces a different texture and effect. Pancetta is widely available, usually presliced in thin sheet; I prefer to buy it from an artisan salumi producer that sells it in a cylindrical roll that allows me to cut it into small dice. Guanciale is less widely available. Both can be bought online from Boccalone, a San Francisco artisan salumeria, and in well-stocked Italian markets.

Also, this recipe uses minimally cooked eggs. All the usual caveats apply; I recommend sourcing eggs from responsible producers that are unlikely to have salmonella problems, but if you’re worried about uncooked eggs, this may not be the recipe for you.

Spaghetti alla Carbonara

*Mise en place is essential for this recipe. Have everything prepared before you start!

Still, some of the things nearest and dearest to our hearts and stomachs are not to be spoken of in the presence of respectable people — and the element of danger only increases their appeal. You’ll have to pry our pork belly sliders from our cold, dead (no doubt from congestive heart failure) hands.

Even Mom, the most vocal worrywart in the family, is not immune to the allure of fatty treats. Every so often over the years, she’d wax rhapsodic about the baroque, egg-laden Portuguese sweets she grew up with in Macau, which was at that time a Portuguese protectorate. I was intrigued by her descriptions of them and by the fact that none of these treats seemed to have a name, at least not that she could remember. One of these, she said, consisted of “tiny strands of egg yolk cooked in sugar, like a little birds’ nest”; another was “a ball of egg yolk that has crunchy sugar on the outside but is creamy when you bite into it”. How could these mysterious wonders not have names?

Later, my curiosity grew with the realization that I’d never seen anything resembling those confections anywhere — and I’ve been fortunate enough to live in places where one can track down just about any ethnic cuisine imaginable. Another reason for my fascination with those treats is that they are made almost entirely of egg yolks. Eggs in themselves, Mom liked to warn, should be eaten only in moderation. But the mystery sweets of her youth not only contained eggs, but only the bad, dangerous, cholesterol-bearing part of the egg, in lethal concentrations. And yet Mom liked to reminisce about those eggy sweets, and would no doubt eat one in a heartbeat if we somehow managed to conjure them up.

Then, last week, she called me, excited by a recent discovery. While browsing an online store featuring Spanish imports, she came across something that looked strikingly familiar — tiny, round convent sweets made of egg yolks, an artisanal specialty made for hundreds of years by an order of Spanish nuns in the walled medieval town of Avila. The description said they were crunchy with sugar on the outside with insides that dissolved on the tongue “without any pressure.”

Bingo. Or as close to “bingo” as we could hope to get: Spain and Portugal are neighboring countries with many shared food traditions, including an obsession with cramming as many egg yolks as possible into the dessert course. (There is a practical historical reason for this: Wine-makers in both countries required large quantities of egg whites to clarify wine, and the nuns used egg whites to starch their habits; hence, a steady supply of egg yolks was ready and waiting to be made into convent sweets.) The resulting cholesterol bombs became so beloved they spread around the world with the Spanish and Portuguese diaspora, evolving as they traveled. Local variants of Iberian egg sweets can be found in locales as far flung as the Philippines, Brazil — and Macau.

And Mom swore those pricey Spanish sweets from that online catalogue looked and sounded exactly like the ones she remembered from Macau. But no way was she going to pay to have those things airlifted in an insulated box from Spain to Los Angeles.

But, she said hopefully, there were recipes for it online, and they sounded pretty simple. I had myself a project.

The recipes I found for this confection, officially called yemas de Santa Teresa (literally “Saint Teresa’s egg yolks,” aka “the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems”), all take the same basic form: make a sugar syrup, mix it with an appalling number of egg yolks, cool the resulting mixture, form it into little balls, then roll the balls in sugar. Some recipes boast only three ingredients: egg yolks, sugar and water. Others enhance the syrup with lemon zest and/or cinnamon. I like the idea of a hit of spice and citrus to offset all that sweetness and richness; it adds to the mysterious medieval vibe of the confections and makes them feel both more and less pointlessly decadent.

I’ve always hated the term “sinful” when applied to food. It seems to reflect the worst aspects of Puritanism (free will and the Puritan work ethic I can get behind; the idea that life must be miserable to be virtuous, not so much). Besides, how could these little treats be sinful? They were invented by nuns. And sold by nuns to support their work. Ergo, those who eat them are doing God’s work.

Given these truths, how could they possibly be bad for you?

The following recipe is a combination of several nearly identical recipes I found online from different sources. Almost all of the credible-looking recipes came from websites based in Spain, which made me glad to have functional Spanish reading skills and a digital scale that allows metric measurements. I’ve converted the measurements to standard American measures.

YEMAS DE SANTA TERESA

Malasadas are the yeasty, eggy, sugary doughnuts that were introduced to the Hawaiian islands by Portuguese immigrants from the Azores generations ago. Eagerly incorporated into the cuisine of the Hawaiian islands, each island has a “best” place to get them. On the Big Island, that place is Tex Drive In, in Honokaa, near Waimea.

To the casual observer, the malasada looks like a typical raised doughnut, rolled in granulated sugar. Stace, one of the kama’aina (locals) I talked to, shed some light on what makes Tex’s malasada special: the first owners converted their recipe for pao doce (Portuguese sweet bread) and used it to make their mouth-watering and award-winning malasadas.

My husband arrived back with the box of malasadas just as the rest of us were waking up, and we quickly devoured them. That’s how you can eat on vacation — without consequences.

Back home, I wanted to make a Sunday brunch to remind us of Hawaii, which we miss too much already, but I don’t do much deep-frying in my kitchen. Thinking back to Stace, Tex’s malasadas, and the Portuguese immigrants who brought their sweet bread and malasadas to another heavenly island home, I made a not-too-guilty replacement: Portuguese sweet bread French toast with coconut syrup.

Portuguese-Hawaiian sweet bread French toast with coconut syrup

Sweet bread makes excellent French toast because of its eggy, light and slightly chewy texture. I made this version with guava- and taro-flavored sweet bread we brought back with us from Punalu’u Bake Shop, which by being located 30 minutes South of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park in Na’alehu is known as the “Southernmost Bakery in the U.S.A.” King’s Hawaiian bread or rolls, readily available in all major grocers on the mainland, make a great substitution. Hawaiian coconut syrup is more difficult to come by, so I’ve made a recipe you can make from ingredients easily found anywhere.