Eggplant
Eggplant is grown around the world. It’s been cultivated and cooked for thousands of years. But nobody is sure where it originated.
Surprisingly, it isn’t particularly nutritious. And raw eggplant can have a bitter taste, with an astringent quality. But it can absorb cooking fats and sauces making it useful in a variety of dishes, and its flesh is smooth, its seeds small and edible, and its skin so tender it does not need to be peeled.
Eggplant is widely used in vegetarian cuisines as a meat substitute, as a basic ingredient that can be steamed, stir-fried, pan fried, deep fried, barbecued, roasted, stewed, curried, or pickled. It can be sliced, diced or mashed to create sauces. It can also be stuffed.
Some food historians believe it originated in India and Bangladesh, where it continues to grow wild. But there’s substantial evidence it was used thousands of years ago, in prehistory, in China, southern and eastern Asia, and in Africa as well. It may have been introduced to those areas through early trading.
Today, China and India produce and use it more than any other countries in the world. In 2020, China grew 65 percent of the world total and India 23 percent.
The first known written record of the plant is found in Qimin Yaoshu, an ancient Chinese agricultural treatise completed in the year 544. There are numerous Arabic and North African names for it, but no ancient Greek and Roman terms.
It’s believed that it was grown throughout the Mediterranean area by the Arabs in the early Middle Ages, who introduced it to Spain in the 8th century. A book on agriculture by Ibn Al-Awwam in 12th-century Arabic Spain described how to cultivate it.
It was unrecorded in England until a botany book in 1597 described it as the “madde” or “raging Apple”.
Like its botanical cousin the tomato, it was at one time believed to be poisonous. The flowers and leaves can, in fact, be poisonous if consumed in large quantities.
The eggplant has a special place in folklore. In 13th-century Italian traditional folklore, the eggplant can cause insanity. In 19th-century Egypt, insanity was said to be “more common and more violent” when the eggplant is in season in the summer.
In the United States, where it didn’t become popular until Thomas Jefferson used it in his garden, eggplant was thought to cause bad breath.
Because of its widespread use in modern times, the vegetable goes by many names.
The name “eggplant” is usual in North American and Australian English and several other languages because the varieties they use resemble chicken eggs. But other names include “aubergine” – in Great Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands – and “brinjai” or “brinjal” in southern Asia and South Africa. White eggplant has been traditionally used in Asian medicine dating back to 1330. A Chinese treatise known as the Yinshan Zhengyao by Hu Sihui depicts principles of safe food and cites text and images of eggplants. In India, Ayurvedic medicine also uses eggplant to aid in the treatment of disease and its roots are used to reduce symptoms of asthma.
It has not only many names, but eggplant has many shapes and colors, too. Many varieties are purple, violet, nearly black, green, striped, speckled or bi-color. They can be egg-shaped, oval, round, elongated or tubular.
Botanically, eggplant is a perennial, tropical fruit. But over the centuries it has been developed as annual plant with a much wider climate range. It still is, however, very sensitive to cold weather and dies at any temperature near freezing.
Raw eggplant is 92 percent water, 6 percent carbohydrates, 1 percent protein. It provides negligible amounts of essential nutrients, with only manganese having a moderate 11 percentage of the recommended daily value.
