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A Trek along the Silk Road,
The Ashy Apples of Sodom, Dining at
Delmonico’s, Thomas Say’s Beetle,
A Pot of Magic Molasses, and
A Condiment for Cannibals
The man who sees on New Year’s Day Mount Fuji, a hawk, and an eggplant is forever blessed.
JAPANESE PROVERB
In Daniel Pinkwater’s Borgel (1990) — one of the most hilarious kids’ science-fiction books of all time — Melvin’s mysterious space- and time-traveling Uncle Borgel tells his young nephew the story of “The Rabbit and the Eggplant,” in which an eggplant challenges a rabbit to a footrace. The townspeople, convinced that the eggplant has some clever trick up its sleeve, bet all their money on it. On the day of the race, the rabbit streaks out of sight and crosses the finish line, while the eggplant just sits there. The infuriated spectators turn on it and eat it. The moral of the story: “Don’t bet on an eggplant.”
For much of history, however, people in effect have been doing just that, since transforming the eggplant from its unpleasant wild ancestor to the lush fat fruit of today must have looked like a long shot. It certainly took a lot of blind faith, dedication, and effort. The original eggplant, botanists believe, blossomed somewhere in south central Asia, where its peculiar-looking fruits, bitter taste, and nasty thorns did little to recommend it to the primitive palate. Nonetheless, some hardy soul eventually domesticated it.
Traditionally, this took place in India, where eggplant pops up in Sanskrit documents as early as 300 BCE. An alternative, or possibly simultaneous, site is China, where a recent survey of ancient Chinese plant literature identified eggplants under cultivation in the Chengdu (Sichuan) province in 59 BCE. Today China and India are the world’s top eggplant producers, with the United States trailing far behind, in twentieth place.
The original Chinese eggplant didn’t taste good, and the best guess is that it was originally cultivated for use as a medicine. (A Chinese medical treatise of the sixteenth century describes eggplant-based preparations for everything from intestinal hemorrhage to toothache.) Perhaps for this reason, when eggplant finally made it to the table, it was eaten nervously. Like the notorious blowfish, it was thought safe only if prepared by trained cooks. Its Chinese name, ch’ieh-pzu, in most pessimistic translation, means poison.
As increasing numbers of diners cleaned their plates without lethal incident, the eggplant become more commonly acceptable, although it still retained a reputation for danger. It reached the Middle East by the sixth century, probably via traders on the Silk Road. Persian physicians were skittish about it, attributing to it a long list of harmful effects, among them pimples, leprosy, and elephantiasis.
The cooks, however, won out, and in the Middle East, the eggplant attained true culinary stardom. Persian chefs, who had already mastered such challenges as smoked camel’s hump, zebra, and Arabian ostrich, were hardly people to balk at eggplant and soon devised hundreds of recipes. The later Turks, whose versatile cuisine featured raisins and olives, goats and pigeons, rose water, almonds, yogurt, and powdered pistachio nuts, were said to eat eggplant at every meal. One dish, eggplant stuffed with pine nuts, was reputedly so overwhelmingly scrumptious that it was known as Imam Bayildi (“The Holy Man Fainted”) because such was its gustatory effect. (An alternative version of the story holds that the cleric fainted in horror, having discovered that his young bride had used up her entire dowry of olive oil in cooking eggplant.)
The eggplant traveled with the invading Moors through northern Africa and into Spain, where in the twelfth century a horticulturally accomplished Moorish Spaniard named Ibnal-Awam described four cultivated varieties: white, violet, dark purple, and black. It arrived in northern Europe by the thirteenth century, where it was received squeamishly. Practically everybody except the dauntless Italians refused to eat it, though it did achieve some popularity in upper-class gardens as an exotic ornamental.
The lavishly illustrated Tacuinum Sanitatis — a series of medieval health manuals translated from the Arabic and much prized by fitness-conscious aristocratic fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Europeans — includes wonderful images of purple eggplants. The accompanying text warned that eggplant was an aphrodisiac: in one illustration a pair of lovers, presumably overcome by desire, embrace in front of a row of eggplants, while an eggplant-impervious chaperon shakes a scandalized finger at them.
Common in Renaissance Europe were small white-fruited varieties — hence the descriptive name “egg” plant — but other types were known. Leonhart Fuchs (1542) mentions purple and yellow eggplants; Rembert Dodoens (1580) — who calls them “unholsome” and claims they fill the body with evil humors — mentions purple and “pale”; and Jacques Dalechamp (1587) describes purple, yellow and “ash-colored” varieties in long, round, and pear shapes.
Master herbalist John Gerard, who lists white, yellow, and brown eggplants in his Great Herball (1597), adds that the Egyptians eat them boiled and roasted, with oil, vinegar, and pepper, and then warns that nobody else should do likewise: “I wish Englishmen to content themselves with meats and sauce of our owne country than with fruit eaten with apparent peril; for doubtless these Raging Apples have a mischevious qualitie, the use whereof is utterly to be forsaken.” John Parkinson in Paradisi in Sole (1629), sounding disbelieving, writes that “in Italy and other hot countries . . . they do eate them [eggplants] with more desire and pleasure than we do Cowcumbers.”
The ominous nickname of raging, or mad, apple derived from eggplant’s reputation for inducing instant insanity in the unwary eater. This originated, the story goes, with the first Occidental to sample the new vegetable. Tickled with its luscious appearance, he gulped one down raw and promptly fell into a fit (the result, one vegetable authority suggests, of acute gastritis). The incident was to haunt the eggplant for centuries. Sir John Mandeville, an inventive (and possibly invented) fourteenth-century traveler, added fuel to the fire when — along with mermaids, monsters, and a lot of wholly imaginary Asian geography — he described the eggplant-like Apples of Sodom, delectable-looking purple Levantine fruits that crumbled to ashes when picked. Milton, in Paradise Lost, fed these to Lucifer’s hapless fallen angels.
Historically, it was clear that the eggplant was a vegetable to approach with trepidation. As well as insanity, it was liable to provoke fever, epilepsy, and unbridled lust. Also, the fruits dangerously resembled those of the demonic mandrake, which shrieked when dug out of the ground, a sound that promptly killed anyone who heard it.
This last, absent the shrieking, had at least an element of truth. The eggplant belongs to the Solanaceae or Nightshade family, along with the tomato, potato, pepper, and petunia, and such dark-sheep cousins as mandrake, tobacco, belladonna, and jimson weed. In 1753, Linnaeus, in his botanical taxonomic opus Species Plantarum, grudgingly listed the eggplant as edible, and assigned it for posterity the scientific name Solanum insanum — later revised to Solanum melongena, which means “soothing mad apple,” a nice piece of scientific fence-sitting if there ever was one.
The Italian common name for eggplant, melanzana, comes directly from the older mala insana, or mad apple. The more tactful French aubergine and Spanish berenjena are derivations of the Indian word for eggplant, brinjal. The English word eggplant, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), dates to the mid-1700s and referred initially to the small white egg-shaped eggplants, though the term was eventually expanded to refer to all eggplants, of any size, shape, or color. The Germans call it the Eierfrucht or eggfruit, and the Jamaicans, who originally got theirs from the conquistadors, refer to them cosily as garden eggs.
When the eggplant did show up on the early European table, it did so in style. A surviving record of an Italian banquet thrown by Pope Pius V in 1570 includes eggplant on the vast menu, in which the papal guests started out with marzipan balls, grapes, and prosciutto cooked in wine, then worked their way through spit-roasted skylarks, partridges, pigeons, and boiled calves’ feet to a grand finale of quince pastries, pear tarts, cheese, and roasted chestnuts. The eggplant appeared in the second course, roasted and sliced, with quails.
In the next century, eggplant was championed by France’s Louis XIV, who, for all his defects, had spectacular taste in food, mistresses, and gardens. The court — less enthusiastic about new foods — resisted, perhaps hoping that the king would be distracted by more appealing seventeenth-century culinary introductions, such as coffee, tea, chocolate, sherbet, turkey, and champagne.
It’s not known when S. melongena made it to the American side of the Atlantic. Some say it arrived with the Spanish explorers; others credit Thomas Jefferson, who grew it, along with everything else he could lay his hands on, in the vast vegetable garden at Monticello. Others hypothesize that eggplant arrived in the slave ships from western Africa, and was first established along the southern coast of the United States, where it was known familiarly as Guinea squash. A final faction claims that eggplant was introduced to American diners by Delmonico’s, the magnificent New York restaurant founded in 1831 by the Swiss Delmonico brothers, Peter and John.
Delmonico’s was coupled with Yosemite Valley by a London newspaper of the 1880s as one of “the two most remarkable bits of scenery in the States.” An endless succession of the rich and famous ate there, including Jenny Lind, Louis Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Dickens — who routinely drank two bottles of champagne and a glass of brandy for lunch — and Samuel F. B. Morse, who dramatically dispatched the world’s first telegram from his table. (A reply came back in forty minutes.) Delmonico’s in the 1830s popularized eggplants and artichokes, both strangers to the relatively lackluster contemporary American cuisine. The restaurant also served up the first American avocadoes, watercress, and truffles, and invented Lobster Newburg, Eggs Benedict, Oysters Rockefeller, and Chicken à la King.
By the nineteenth century, eggplant appeared regularly in cookbooks, baked, stuffed, boiled, fried in butter, or, more exotically, stewed in wine and pepper or pickled in honey and vinegar. Mary Randolph, in The Virginia Housewife (1824), claims that the purple ones are best, and recommends parboiling them, then frying, dipped in egg yolk and grated bread. “They are very delicious,” she says, “tasting much like soft crabs.” Miss Eliza Leslie, in her Directions for Cookery (1840), included recipes for eggplant stewed, fried, and stuffed, adding unexpectedly that “Eggplant is sometimes eaten at dinner, but generally at breakfast.” Sarah Rorer, in her Philadelphia Cookbook (1886), recommends that fried eggplant be served with tomato catsup.
Eliza Leslie’s eggplants were doubtless fried in the very best butter — Miss Leslie came down hard on cooks who reserved their sour or spoiled butter for cooking purposes — and they even more certainly soaked up a lot of that butter during the cooking process. A notable characteristic of the eggplant is its spongy texture.
Solanum uporo — nicknamed the “cannibal tomato” — is actually a cannibal eggplant, native to Tahiti and the Fiji islands. According to Berthold Seeman, who made a somewhat nervous visit to Fiji (then known as the Cannibal Islands) in 1860, S. uporo, a two-inch tomato-red fruit, was a favored stomach-settling accompaniment to a meal of people. “It appears,” Seeman noted, “that human flesh is extremely difficult to digest.”
Like a sponge, eggplant tissue contains a large number of inter-cellular air pockets capable of holding a hefty amount of liquid. Unlike a sponge, however, eggplant reaches a point in the cooking process where it becomes self-squeezing: eventually the heat generated by frying causes the cellular structure to collapse, flattening the air pockets, and extruding the accumulated oil. Popular today for fried eggplant feasts is olive oil, the ingredient that caused the legendary imam to faint — but Middle Eastern gourmets traditionally used alya, an oil rendered from the overgrown tails of a special breed of fat-tailed sheep. (The valuable tails were sometimes supported on small two-wheeled wooden carts to protect them from the ordinary wear and tear of sheep life.) Oil-less eggplant possesses a mere 50 calories per cup; sautéed, over 300.
By the nineteenth century, the eggplant was also firmly established as a denizen of the vegetable garden. Vilmorin-Andrieux list fifteen kinds — ten purple, two white, two green, and one striped in purple and white “lengthways” — but purple was the undisputed king. “The purple eggplant is almost the only color grown in our kitchen gardens,” writes Edward Sturtevant in his late-nineteenth-century Notes on Edible Plants. The famous purple results from ring-shaped chemical compounds called anthocyanins, from the Greek for “blue flower.” Unfortunately these biological blues, reds, and purples are both water-soluble and heat-sensitive, which bodes ill for their survival in the cooking pot and explains why boiled red cabbage and strawberry jam often go an unappetizing pinkish brown.
The loss of purple is seldom a consideration in eggplants, which are often peeled before cooking. Once peeled, however, eggplants, like apples, avocadoes, bananas, raw potatoes, and pears, have a tendency to turn an ugly brown. In these fruits, cell disruption by teeth or paring knife releases an enzyme called polyphenol oxidase, which reacts with phenolic compounds in the fruit tissue to form unappetizing brown polymers.
In some cases the browning reaction can be slowed down by chilling, though in others cold only makes matters worse: bananas, for example, natives of the balmy tropics, undergo rapid cell damage in the cold and release quantities of polyphenol oxidase, which is why banana peels turn black in the refrigerator. The browning enzyme is also inhibited by the chloride ions in salt, which is useful in the case of potatoes and eggplants, frequently served salted, but less so in the case of apples and pears. Polyphenol oxidase is most effectively blocked by acidic conditions, which is why a dash of citric-acid-rich lemon juice does wonders for preserving the green in guacamole. Browning is also inhibited by ascorbic acid, better known as vitamin C.
Phenolic compounds, however, are far more than potentially unsightly culinary nuisances. Phenolics are antioxidants, effective at sopping up reactive and cell-damaging free radicals, with reported benefits that include antiaging and anticancer effects and a reduction in LDL (“bad cholesterol”). In 2003, researchers John Stommel and Bruce Whitaker analyzed 115 different eggplant varieties from locations as far-flung as southeast Asia and Africa, plus popular cultivars grown in the United States, and found that eggplants are powerhouses of antioxidant activity. Eggplants contain some fourteen different phenolic compounds, most prominently the particularly potent chlorogenic acid.
Stommel and Whitaker’s eggplants came from stores at the National Plant Germplasm Center in Griffin, Georgia — a repository of seeds of cultivated crop plants and their wild relatives. They found an astonishing diversity of eggplants. While the most familiar in the United States today is the bulbous purple pear, eggplants also come in red, yellow, green, and orange, and in shapes that range from long and cucumberlike to tiny and round. There are narrow finger-shaped Oriental varieties, and slim foot-long curved cultivars called snake eggplants.
All, botanically, are fruits — specifically, giant berries developing from flowers that sprout, unusually, smack out of the plant stem rather than from a leaf axil. Even in cultivated varieties, the stems may still carry a few scattered spines, remnants of the days when the ancestral eggplant battled off herbivores with off-putting inch-long thorns.
Purple pears possess green calyces and predominate on vegetable counters; the skinny Oriental types have purple calyces and, though curiously less popular, are tastier. The superiority of the flesh of the Oriental eggplant derives from its slow-developing seeds, which give the Oriental cultivars less of a tendency toward bitterness than their seedier American equivalents. Seediness, incidentally, is the root of all evil in over-the-hill eggplants: those past their prime, identifiable by their brownish tinge and telltale puckery look, are heavily seeded and inedibly bitter.
One of the prime consumers of eggplant, however, is not all that picky. Leptinotarsa decemlineata, the Colorado potato beetle, is said to like eggplants even better than potatoes. The beetle was first described in 1823 by Thomas Say, a founder of the Entomological Society of America and the author of the much-respected three-volume American Entomology (1824–1828). Say served as chief entomologist at the Philadelphia Museum of Science, where, between bug-collecting expeditions, it was his custom to sleep under the skeleton of a horse in the museum collection.
At the time of his seminal description, the beetle, yet to discover the delights of potatoes and eggplants, was a fairly innocuous creature living off buffalo bur, a solanaceous weed of the Colorado River basin. It came across potatoes sometime in the mid-nineteenth century, when Western settlers started planting them, and moved ravenously eastward in search of them, encountering along the way such additional goodies as eggplants, peppers, and tomatoes. Steadily eating, it reached Illinois in 1864, Ohio in 1869, and the East Coast in 1874, and had managed to cross the Atlantic to Europe in 1876.
Adult potato beetles are about half an inch long, striped lengthwise in black and yellow. They’re relatively lethargic creatures, enough so to qualify for the first set of one British gardener’s anti-pest instructions: “If it moves slowly enough, step on it; if it doesn’t, leave it — it’ll probably kill something else.”
Though effective, this method was impractical commercially, and farmers instead turned to the arsenic-based chemical pesticide Paris green — so named from its early use as a rat killer in the Paris sewers. Paris green, sounding pleasantly benign, appears in “Three Boys With Jugs of Molasses and Secret Ambitions,” one of Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories (1922). The three boys of the title step in a puddle of spilled molasses, which magically shrinks them to the size of beetles, and visit the Potato Bug Country. There they have marvelous adventures with spider villages and railroad trains until Mr. Sniggers, applying Paris green to his potato plants, splatters some onto their heads, which causes them to regain their normal size.
In real life, a splatter of Paris green on one’s head was likely to have been lethal. Paris green slaughtered potato beetles for about thirty years, until it was replaced by the even more potent lead arsenate in 1892. Both compounds were necessarily used in immense quantities — ten to one hundred pounds per acre — and possessed dire side effects, killing off, along with the beetles, birds, household pets, and an occasional human being.
These days the latest in anti-beetle preparations is a “biological pesticide,” a new strain of a toxin-producing microorganism, the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. The toxin, a digestive-tract poison, is highly specific, affecting only the target insect species, and thus sparing dogs, children, and other living things. The time-honored method for small-scale disposal of potato beetles, however, is still to pick them off the plants one by one and drop them into a coffee can of soapy water.