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It is widely thought by the uninitiated that cookbook editors spend their time lunching with literary agents, crafting beautiful culinary prose line-by-line with brilliant authors, leaning over a lightboard and anointing as print-worthy the best pieces of a star food photographer’s work, and, on a slow day, kicking back and reading the latest reports on next year’s hot food trends. It’s an almost glamorous image, at once cerebral and aesthetic, kind of a toned down and less catty version of what happens (or used to happen) on an episode of “Ugly Betty.”

The reality is different. All those tasks make their claims on an editor’s time, but taken together they add up to about a tenth of the daily calendar. What happens in the remaining ninety percent? That very large block is reserved for meetings with upper management, the art department, and the marketing department about what to show on the covers of forthcoming titles.

These long meetings about typefaces, subtitles, colors, and, above all, the content of the cover’s photograph are often excruciating—after all, nobody really knows the right answer—and occasionally exhilarating, if and when some kind of consensus at last is reached. Until that moment, it’s something of a free for all.

Fortunately, there are some rules of thumb about what you can do on a cookbook cover, and these at least mean that you don’t start with an infinity of options. Generally it’s thought to be a good idea to avoid a lot of browns or blacks. The typography and look of the cover should have some continuity with the way the book’s pages look, and this, too, delimits your choices. When it comes to the cover’s photograph (or photographs), the goal is always to look hip and contemporary—I have said “That looks like Good Housekeeping circa 1958” maybe five hundred times in cover meetings, sounding as if I actually once held a 1958 copy of GH in my hands—and very yummy.  And a cardinal rule is to avoid showing foods which, though they have their devotees, turn some people off, like oysters, sweetbreads, quail, or eggplant.

That’s why not a few of us were surprised when the much-anticipated Plenty, by Yotam Ottolenghi, appeared last year from Chronicle Books with four eggplant halves on its cover. They are nicely stuffed and dressed eggplant halves, but eggplant it is, and those of supposedly us in the know thought that was a risky and contrarian move. (We thought the same about the book’s padded cover, a manufacturing trick we thought was meant for collections of bible stories for toddlers.) We were, of course, wrong. The book has been wildly successful, not only because of its beautiful recipes and photos, I think, but also because its cover was gutsy enough to buck the predictable patterns.

I started thinking about eggplant photos the other day when I was looking for a recipe to feature here from a blog I have a lot of fun reading and have come to admire very much, Kimberley Hasselbrink’s The Year in Food.  Most food blogs dip into and out of seasonality as a theme, but The Year in Food is all about cooking in and with the seasons. It’s filled with stunning photos, and by shooting such good photos—and, in surprisingly compelling way, writing about what makes food look good to her eye—Kimberley makes a pretty decent case that we ought to plan our menus visually and not just for nutrition and taste. Her bi-weekly feature called “Color Studies” is great to read and fun to look at.

Among the recent posts from The Year in Food, the one I picked for sharing here was a roasted eggplant with a miso-lime dressing. The original post in its entirety is here. I liked it because it was something I wanted to eat, of course, but also because there was something mysterious and even gripping about its photo. I kept thinking, “Why does something that looks so wrong look so right?” This would be nobody’s idea of a cookbook-cover photo, and the eggplant looks as if, for every person who would think it’s nicely charred, there might be another who thought it was, well, a little bit burnt. Once I was sure I fell into the former camp, I wrote to Kimberley to ask for permission to post it. She let on that this wasn’t her idea of her best photo ever, but she graciously said yes all the same.

Here is Kimberley’s simple and appealing recipe.

Roasted Eggplant with Miso Lime Dressing

I thought that I was pretty unbiased in my appreciation of vegetables. But I realized that I really just want to cook with cauliflower and brussels sprouts, again and again, every week. They are the first vegetables that come to mind no matter what new dish I am brainstorming. Rarely am I inspired by cabbage, beets, bell peppers, or eggplant.

So I’ve been aiming to change my ways. Get out of my vegetable comfort zone and expand my gustatory horizon. And that’s how we got here. I am pretty certain that I love eggplant in the right context – soft and spicy and stir-fried with basil at a Thai restaurant, or in eggplant parmesan, of course, that cheese-burdened but deeply delicious staple of childhood dinners at Italian restaurants. But it’s been years since I’ve considered preparing it at home. And perhaps that is because I have failed with eggplant and that failure has resulted in a bitter dish that left a terrible feeling in the tummy. No wonder!

This time I was determined to have an eggplant win. I recalled the tangy miso dressing from Bon Appetit’s Food Lover’s Cleanse and had a suspicion that it would be a great ally atop some slow-roasted eggplant. And it was. So much so that I ate more of this in one sitting than I’d like to admit. Salty, faintly sweet, with the smoky flavors of sesame oil and the bright pucker of rice vinegar and lime, it’s the perfect foil for soft, creamy eggplant. Finish with fresh cilantro and some spicy togaroshi (a Japanese condiment of chili and sesame) and you’ve got a hefty, gratifying dish.

Serves 4

• 1 large eggplant
• 2 tablespoons rice vinegar
• 1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil
• 1 tablespoon honey
• zest of 1 lime
• 1 tablespoon lime juice
• 1 tablespoon water
• 3 tablespoons white miso

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• chopped fresh cilantro
• togaroshi, optional

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
2. Prepare the dressing. Whisk together rice vinegar, sesame oil, honey, lime juice and zest and water. Next, blend miso with the ingredients, using a fork to mash and then form into a paste.
3. Slice the eggplant in half lengthwise. Pierce the surface with a fork. Spoon the dressing liberally over the eggplant.
4. Roast until eggplant is falling-apart tender, about 45 minutes to an hour.
5. Remove from oven. Sprinkle with cilantro and togaroshi, if desired.
6. When eating, it’s best to mix together the miso dressing with the tender eggplant beneath to distribute the salty miso flavors.

Recipe and photo used by permission of Kimberley Hasselbrink

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