EGGPLANT: THE KING OF VEGETABLES

Sometimes There’s a FABULOUS Vegetable Hiding in Plain Sight Waiting for Everyone to Try It

Eggplant varieties. Pay no attention to the handful of okra in the upper right. Photo credit: Montana State University, Western Agricultural Research Center.

Why hasn’t any garden or food writer in the U.S. done a deep horticultural AND culinary dive into eggplants? I know why — because while potatoes came in with a whopping 430 million tons in their last worldwide crop count and tomatoes hit nearly 210 million tons, eggplants came in with a mere 66 million tons. Plenty of deep dive stories on tomatoes and potatoes. The U.S.’s production of eggplant, by the way, comes to just under 110,000 tons. Adding to that, China is the top producer and eater of eggplants. Following China, in order: India, Egypt, Turkey, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Iran, and, of course, Italy; then there’s thirteen other countries before the United States shows up at number 22 on the list. Eggplant is, simply, not an American food; we don’t grow it much, we don’t eat it much.

I, on the other hand, love eggplant. It’s easy to grow in the garden and it’s found in a myriad of dishes in all of my favorite cuisines: Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern, and Mediterranean. Growing up Italian included my introduction to this luscious fruit (yes, botanically that’s what it is). The Asian, Indian, etc. stuff all came into my life much later. So yes, I acquired the taste early on and now it’s full blown.

We Sicilians call them milinciana, pronouncing it milinˈt͡ʃana (maybe sounding like mil-lin-johnny). In Italian it’s melanzana. That comes from the Greek melintzana, which the Greeks borrowed from the Arabic bāḏinjān but the Greeks put an “m” at the beginning because they lacked that “b” sound in their language. Solanum melongena, as botanists have named it, is commonly called “eggplant” in the U.S., as well as in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, but it goes by many names elsewhere: it’s “aubergine” in France, Ireland, and the U.K.; in China, it’s qiézi (which sounds an awful lot like kuàizi, which is chopsticks), and “brinjal” (from the Portuguese “beringela!”) in India (although “baigan” is the word used for it culinarily), Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa, and Sri Lanka.