Roasted Eggplant Salad with Tomatoes and Pine Nuts

This dish takes inspiration from salatit el-batinjan, a Middle Eastern tomato-eggplant salad. We tried a few techniques for cooking the eggplant. Broiling created a nice char but added little flavor. Roasting large chunks turned the salad slippery and mushy. Our winning method was cutting the eggplant into small cubes and salting them to expel bitterness, then roasting them in a high-heat oven. This yielded bite-size eggplant pieces with caramelized exteriors and creamy centers. Japanese and Chinese eggplant have tender skin, fewer seeds and a better flesh-to-skin ratio for this dish, but if you can’t find them, globe eggplants work. Cocktail tomatoes (sometimes sold as Campari tomatoes) are dependably tasty, no matter the season. Avoid juicy tomato varieties, which will add too much liquid. We love the pops of color and texture added by pine nuts and pomegranate seeds. If you can’t find the latter, just double the nut quantity to 2 tablespoons. This salad is an excellent accompaniment to roasted meats.