Guinea Squash

With its plush curves, lustrous smooth skin, rich color, and ample size, the eggplant vies with the tomato as the most sensuous plant on one’s kitchen counter. It became a summer mainstay in South Carolina and Virginia before any other of the United States. At first, we knew it by another name. South Carolinians called eggplants guinea squash for a century and a half before national wholesale produce suppliers forced grocers to change their nomenclature. Certain foods that crossed the Atlantic with enslaved Africans had their African genesis recognized by prefixing the common English name of the generic item with “Guinea,” the West African territory in which the Mandingo and Fula peoples lived: Guinea corn (Sorghum vulgaris), Guinea fowl (Numida meleagris), Guinea pea (Abrus precatorius), and Guinea Squash (the eggplant; Solatium melongena and Solanum aethiopicum). The name eggplant arose shortly after it was introduced into England as a horticultural novelty at the end of the sixteenth century. A small white fruited variety shaped like a goose egg became a garden specimen plant. The long purple fruited variety did not gain a foothold in European cuisine until the 1840s. In the American colonies, however, it became a fixture in those regions where enslaved Africans labored: the West Indies, the mainland South, Central America, and Brazil.