Eggplant: An Origin Story

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Today, we’re looking at eggplants! Like most of the culinary vegetables we eat, eggplant is also a botanical berry.

It should be noted that in British English and many other languages, eggplants are called aubergines or similar. Australian and American English use eggplant, though aubergine is seeing increased use in Australia. Aubergine comes from the French word for eggplant, which ultimately stems from (if we skip a bunch of steps) the Sanskrit vātiga-gama, which means “the plant that cures the wind.”

Eggplants come in a lot of varieties, though in the States we mostly see the large, shiny, black globe eggplants unless you shop in ethnic grocery stores. Although eggplants do not have genders, many people do gender them according to their “belly buttons.” If they have a shallow, circular indention, they’re presumed male. Deeper, elongated indention? Female. The reason anyone cares about the indention is because in most instances, a shallow navel will exist in an eggplant that has fewer seeds.

Since the bitterness of eggplant comes from the seeds (this is true of a lot of fruits), you pick the “male” one. If you get a “female” eggplant and care about this, you may remove some or all of the seeds to remove bitterness and/or you can salt it. To salt, cut your eggplant up however you wanted it, then mix it up with a bunch of salt and let it sit for 30 minutes in a colander in the sink. You will need to rinse it well to get the salt out, because eggplant effectively functions as a sponge. This is a lot like how mushrooms are, but with the volume turned up on the sponge front.

If you wanted to know, the bitterness comes from nicotinoid alkaloids, which basically means they have nicotine in them. So do potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers. You’d need to eat about 20 eggplants to get the same nicotine dose you’d get from a single, full-strength cigarette, so don’t try to use eggplants as part your smoking cessation regimen! It’s really not gonna be a viable way of skirting withdrawal.

I personally the bitterness removal options to be far more work than I’m willing to put into a meal. That’s just me, though. If I am cooking for someone who is especially sensitive to bitterness, I simply select a small navel eggplant. If I’m not, I select my eggplant based on the size (medium or small is better than large in term of bitterness), skin tension, density of fruit, and firmness of fruit. The same basic way you select most fruits, I guess?

Here’s a picture of the differences in the “male” and “female” eggplants:

As you can see, male is closer to circular and is more shallow. Female is elongated and deeper.

Botany

Solanum melongena, Solanum integrifolium, and Solanum gilo are the 3 main types of eggplants. Most of what we eat is S. melongena. S. gilo is a cultivar of the Ethiopian eggplant, and S. integrifolium is commonly called “pumpkin on a stick.” It’s actually an eggplant and you really can eat it, but most people grow these as ornamentals due to how eye catching they are in flower arrangements and such. I have seeds for these I’m saving for CT’s school’s community garden, since I want to incorporate a lot of unusual and fun foods into it.

Tell me you don’t want to try these:

Anyone who tries to tell me that these aren’t the coolest plants ever is gonna see my fingers in my ears as I’m singing “la-la-la-can’t-hear-you!”

Back to the ranch (it’s where the deer and the antelope play, for all you Aldi Aisle of Shame fans!). What you may not have known about eggplants is that they’re perennials. Well, in tropical regions where they’re meant to grow. For those of you in temperate climates, you know these as annuals since they can’t survive your winters. I really miss your winters, and particularly since Texas sits smack dab in the middle of the hottest portion of the year right now. Our heat indices (as of the time of writing this) have been hitting up to 114F here, I’ve been having problems with my A/C (it’s always something, 2020), and we’re almost 2 weeks out from the first False Fall.

Some eggplants will have spiny stems, some not. They have all 5 petals per flower, which can range in color from purple to white. They have that “classic” nightshade look to them with the vibrant yellow stamens and conical petal arrangement. Flowers are largely self-pollinating, but sometimes bees and such do like to get into the mix on the cross-pollination front.

The leaves of the eggplant are lobed (have clefts) and alternate (they’re staggered up the stem instead of opposite in pairs across the stem from one another), green to grey colored and typically with a coarse sort of fuzz on the leaves. The plants generally grow from 1-8’ tall. They can get quite big!

I love this kind of plant drawing.

Leaf Myth

You can eat the leaves. Everyone says they’re poison, but they’re not. Ditto tomato leaves. Tomato leaves are the only ones I’ve tried; this is solely because I haven’t grown enough eggplant to take leaves since I learned this. One day I shall!

The most common application for tomato leaves is to return that fresh tomato aroma to sauces that otherwise is lost in the cooking process. Eggplant leaves, in contrast, are not especially flavorful but can be eaten. You can view them as a sort of survival crop if you’re not particularly curious about eating them otherwise. There’s a kind of vegetable related to our eggplant called eggplant leaf, too, which is grown in many parts of Africa as a staple vegetable. I do not have seeds for this and have not tried it. YET.

This next bit isn’t related because it’s not a nightshade (it’s morning glory family instead), but those of you growing sweet potatoes can eat those leaves as well. In Sierra Leone, there’s a very popular dish called potato leaf stew. Liberians have a fried leaf dish that’s too appealing to me to not show y’all (note that there are chicken feet that didn’t make it into the chicken post!):

History!

Eggplant is “is indigenous to a vast area stretching from northeast India and Burma, to Northern Thailand, Laos, Viet Nam and Southwest China and wild plants can still be found in these locations.” Generally speaking, most sources will tell you that these are solely from India and spread quickly to all of these other nations. However, other sources speculate about North African and Middle Eastern origins. Unfortunately, there just aren’t written records of the early period of eggplant cultivation. That said, we generally don’t do a whole lot of trading plants that we aren’t also domesticating or have already domesticated. Unless you’re a colonial English time traveler from way back when, of course, in which case you sent a ton of stuff back home that you weren’t yet sure was good to send from wherever you were: like poison ivy from America, for example. But if you’re not a time traveler, you aren’t infecting Europe with poison ivy and you probably also aren’t spreading eggplant around until you’re cultivating it in your own garden. So for these to grow wild in all these places, it’s probably the full indigenous range of the plant.

The earliest written record of the eggplant documented in Chinese ancient literature is the statement of Wang Bao in his work Tong Yue in 59 bc (Wang, 59 bc). He states: ‘In the second month of the year, the Spring Equinox … separate and transplant seedlings of eggplant and scallion’. About the same time, Yang Xiong in his famous A Rhapsody on Metropolitan of Shu (Yang, 1st century bc to 1st century ad) mentioned: ‘The eggplant is included as one of the vegetable crops’. Both of these records referred to the eggplant that was then planted on the Chengdu Plain of south-west China (Fig. 1). These records, although rather brief, revealed that the eggplant was already being specifically cultivated in gardens as a crop, not a wild form collected from the surrounding habitat. They also indicate that the domestication of the eggplant took place not later than 59 bc in China. As far as is known, this is the earliest record of eggplant, the time of which is precisely determined.

“Distribution map of eggplant references in the early Chinese literature, before the crop's spread across the entire region by the 6th century. Black symbols indicate documented sites recorded in ancient Chinese literature.” (Ibid Results)

Later writings that are typically cited in eggplant literature as the first writings discuss size and other aspects of cultivation that were underway centuries after the first substantiated instance of domesticated eggplant. These sources also matter, but we aren’t going to spend time on them today.

Although the Greeks and Romans knew about eggplant, they didn’t really get into it at all until the 7th and 8th centuries, as part of Muslim expansion into Europe. Persians also get eggplant to Africa around the same time. Spain gets eggplants from Arab traders during the same expansion. You guys know at least the basics of that more detailed history already from the pepper series, so we’ll go on ahead and skip over it today, too.

Europe did not, as is generally the case with all nightshades, take too well to this initially. It’s not their fault, really. Almost all the nightshades indigenous to Europe are deadly.

This exceptionally deadly plant, Atropa belladonna, is the prettiest of all the nightshades. In my opinion, at least. But this plant is why most Europeans consistently struggled to accept edible nightshades into their lives.

Albertus Magnus (AKA Albert of Cologne) called them “mad apples,” which is a name that’s still used in some pockets of the world. The Northern Europeans really did struggle on this front until around the 10th-century, though, at which time they began to adopt the eggplant as a viable food source, as well as an aphrodisiac in several European cultures.

This is one piece of medieval eggplant art.

“FIG. 7 . Aubergine (eggplant),Solanum melongena, depicted in the Tacuinum Sanitatis: (A) Vienna 2644 folio 31v; (B) Paris 9333 folio 21r; (C) Rome 4182folio 41r; (D) Rouen 3054 folio 21r; (E) Paris 1673 folio 25v.

“Vienna 2644 folio 31v (Fig. 7A) is not only one of the most stunning paintings in all of the Tacuinum manuscripts, it is also the most botanically correct in its depiction of aubergine, labelled Melongiana. This illustration appears to have been drawn from live plants in a garden, as four plants are depicted as aligned in a row. Moreover, the plants are depicted accurately for leaf shape, fruit and calyx size, shape and colour, and they are loaded with realistic egg-shaped, deep purple, glossy fruits at different stages of growth, the younger, smaller ones correctly depicted as borne near the plant apices. Eggplants have prominent, attractive corollas, usually purple, but, strangely, they are not shown. The plants are taller than the people in the foreground and exhibit only a few apical branches. Adult plants can indeed reach a person’s height but are more highly branched, suggesting that either the plants were pruned or, for clarity and aesthetics, basal branches simply were not drawn.

“Vienna 2644 folio 31v (Fig. 7A) shows a lady admonishing a couple in which the man is fondling his female partner…”

It is Spain, as you’d expect, that gets eggplant over to South America somewhere around c.1650 while they were doing the chocolate and gold thing over there. This is also when eggplant hits the Caribbean islands.

Some sources claim that Spanish and Portuguese sailors brought eggplant over to Central and North America in the 15th-century (so a century-ish before they took it to South America), and others claim that it’s Thomas Jefferson who brought eggplant to the United States (and the Central and North American regions in sum) in 1806.

What I assume really happened is that the Spaniards and Portuguese did take eggplant across the pond much sooner than other other European powers did, because Iberian peoples were legitimately more receptive to the fruits than other European peoples initially were.

I also assume that eggplant didn’t make it to the USA itself until 1806 because the States didn’t yet include all the parts of America it currently does. Keep in mind that the States hadn’t purchased Florida, even, until 1819, and other parts of Spanish/Mexican territories weren’t fully absorbed into the American territory until 1850 (including those that were not yet official states, like New Mexico). Jefferson was also into the French, as was standard back then for American elites, as well as into gardening (especially unusual plants), and the French had been into eggplants for a couple of centuries already.

These are the Spanish and Portuguese holdings in 1790. The impact of this on both colonial and early post-colonial American access to eggplants would have been massive.

Modernity

By this time, eggplant really does become pretty ubiquitous, even if still quite polarizing. I have noticed, anyway, that people either really like eggplant or really don’t. Doesn’t seem to be much liminality here, really. For those of you who are into eggplant, you can apparently make jerky and something bacon-ish out of it. Who knew? Well, y’all probably knew, but I did not!

As immigration increased in America, so did eggplant love. By 1904, there was a cookbook in the States that included eggplant! Andrew Johnson, who normally is only discussed in terms of the Trail of Tears and his near-impeachment, fell in love with eggplant, and particularly liked them stuffed. Like this. The commentary in this video is gold.

These days, eggplant can be found on a large percentage of menus in a large percentage of regions around the world, and is generally viewed favorably by most people. There are insane numbers of types you can get seeds for and grow, and gagillions of recipes for any mood of eggplant eating you might be in!

As of 2014, 50,000 million tonnes of eggplant were grown, providing net annual values of 10 billion dollars! The rise in popularity of ketogenic diets also helps eggplant get more traction, because it’s a fantastic low-carb veg that is diverse enough in what it can do to perform a wide array of culinary tasks. Additionally, as we learn more and more about what a nutritional powerhouse eggplant is, that also helps spread the word, as it were.

This is pretty much all I want to say about eggplant today. It’s been a while since we’ve closed with a silly video, though, so today is the day!