Eggplant

Eggplant, like chilli—another member of the vast nightshade family—exists in an astonishing array of colors, shapes, sizes, and textures. But for eggplant, unlike chilli, I know of no significant popular books to help me address a subject that requires a volume to explain its complexities.

Eggplant is common enough that I need not describe its usual market types or the fundamentals of its cookery. But a touch of history is needed to account for its amazing diversity. Eggplant is one of the few Old World species of a family famous for its New World edible forms (along with one smokable form, tobacco): chillis and bell peppers, tomatoes, and potatoes. Eggplant is no more typically purple and pear-shaped (America’s main market type) than it is green and egg-size, or ivory and scimitar-slim, or raspberry-striped and oval. Nor is eggplant Italian, as Americans might have assumed until recently.