Grilled Eggplant & White Bean Salad

Do you remember Martha Rose Shulman’s weekly “Recipes for Health” column in the New York Times? In it, she shared a set of four original, health-focused recipes every single week — and did it for years. There are over a thousand of her recipes in the NYT archives.

She was hugely influential for me as a young cook, and in fact I still find her writing to be a masterclass in elegant efficiency. Her health-forward approach also always appealed: It never feels as if it comes from a mindset of restriction, but rather focuses on nutrient-density, ingredient variety, and a grounded creativity.

I think of her during eggplant season because it was in one of her columns I learned that an eggplant’s skin — the part of the vegetable that I typically torched to smithereens and discarded — contains a heap of antioxidants and much of the vegetable’s nutrition.

Inspired by Martha R. S., and more recently, Leela Punyaratabandhu’s Grilled Eggplant Salad in Flavors of the Southeast Asian Grill, I wanted to create a recipe that retains some of eggplant’s structure and does not waste its skin. So I grilled it as Leela instructs, which is halved and placed right over the flame, then folded it into a bowl of punchy marinating beans.