Fall 13 County Fare
by Diana Cercone
Growing up in an Italian family, I learned at an early age to love the taste of eggplant. They were as plentiful on my mother’s table as her meatballs. My grandfather, Rocco, grew them in his vegetable garden. Luckily for us, he lived next door. From mid-July to late October hardly a week went by without one or two of my mother’s eggplant creations. She would fry thin slices of eggplant for Parmesan or stuff them with a mix of ground beef, tomatoes and ricotta, sprinkling them with grated Locatelli cheese and breadcrumbs, and set them in the oven to bake. One of my favorites was her fried eggplant chunks that she would dip in egg and breadcrumbs be-fore frying. I would gobble them up like potato chips.
When I left for college, stuffed among the family photos I brought with me were her eggplant recipes. Since then I’ve added many of my own—still keeping to the Italian varieties I grew up with. But that was before I met Brenda Slack.
Brenda grows a variety of eggplant on her farm, Milk House Farm & Market, in Newtown. The farm and farmhouse sit on top of a narrow ribbon of a road named after her family and is as picturesque as a Hollywood movie set. Brenda is the 4th generation of Slacks to run the farm, which dates to the 1850s. She’s the first to grow vegetables. Everyone else in her family were dairy farmers.
To finish this article about eggplants, turn to page 134 in the Fall 2013 issue of Bucks County Magazine.