Eggplant

• 1. Introduction

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  Eggplant, known to science as Solanum melongena, carries a different name depending on who is talking. North Americans, Australians and Filipinos say eggplant. The British, Irish and New Zealanders say aubergine. Across India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa and Sri Lanka, the word is brinjal. In Caribbean English it is baigan.

  Behind those four labels sits a single member of the nightshade family, Solanaceae, grown worldwide for its edible fruit. In 2024 the world produced 57.5 million tonnes of it. China supplied 61 percent of that total, and India added 23 percent.

  Numbers like these hide a stranger record. This is a plant that gave its name to madness in one century and to a beloved side dish in another. It is forbidden on one religious table and celebrated as the king of vegetables on others. How did one plant collect so many names, and why did people once fear it? Where did it begin, and how did it reach English gardens and Spanish kitchens? And why do cooks from Seoul to Tehran treat the same fruit in such different ways?

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• 2. A Word That Travelled

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  The oldest traceable ancestor of the word aubergine lies in the Dravidian languages, whose modern descendants include Malayalam vaṟutina and Tamil vaṟutuṇai. The word passed into the Indo-Aryan languages as Sanskrit and Pali vātiṅ-gaṇa. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Sanskrit form meant roughly the class of things that remove the wind-disorder, because eggplants were thought to cure flatulence. Modern Hindustani baingan and began descend directly from it. Persian borrowed the word as bādingān, and Arabic turned it into bāḏinjān.

  Hobson-Jobson observes: "probably there is no word of the kind which has undergone such extraordinary variety of modifications, whilst retaining the same meaning, as this." The dictionary's remark is easy to believe once the Arabic form reaches Europe.

  In al-Andalus, the Arabic word became Portuguese bringella and beringela, and Spanish berenjena and alberenjena. Spanish alberenjena was borrowed into French as aubergine, which reached British English in the late eighteenth century. Portuguese colonial expansion carried bringella much further afield. It produced brinjal in Indian, Malaysian, Singaporean and South African English, first attested in the seventeenth century. West Indian English bent it through folk etymology into brown-jolly, and La Réunion has French bringelle. Indian English therefore received brinjal by way of Portuguese, even though its deepest roots lie on the subcontinent.

  The name eggplant has a plainer story. In 1763 the word was first recorded, and it described white cultivars that looked very much like hen's eggs. Icelandic eggaldin and Welsh planhigyn ŵy follow the same logic. White, egg-shaped fruits were also called garden eggs from 1811, and the Oxford English Dictionary records vegetable egg between 1797 and 1888. Southern American English adds guinea squash, a nod to the fruit's association with West Africa. Jew's apple, another old name, reflects a belief that Jewish people first brought the fruit to the West Indies.

  Greek took a different road. By the eleventh century Arabic bāḏinjān had been borrowed into Greek, where it began with m- because Greek lacked an initial b- sound and because the word for black, melas, sounded similar. Attested forms include matizanion in the eleventh century, melintzana in the fourteenth and melintzanion in the seventeenth. In Sicily the twelfth century recorded melanzāna, and in thirteenth-century Latin the word appears as melongena. Italian listeners were about to hear a far more alarming word inside melanzana.

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• 3. Suspicion and Poison

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  By the thirteenth century, Italian melanzana had been reshaped through folk etymology into mela insana, meaning mad apple. A tradition followed that eggplants could cause insanity. English borrowed the idea as mad-apple, rage-apple and raging apple, and the name is attested from 1578. In Southern American English the form mad-apple can still be heard. Nineteenth-century Egypt kept the belief alive, with a report that insanity was "more common and more violent" when eggplant was in season in the summer.

  The fear had a plausible root. Eggplant belongs to the nightshade family, and because of that kinship the fruit was at one time believed to be extremely poisonous. Its flowers and leaves can indeed be poisonous in large quantities because they contain solanine. The seeds taste bitter because they carry or are coated with nicotinoid alkaloids, like those in the related tobacco plant.

  Medieval Iranian writers had their own warnings. Al-Razi and al-Biruni cautioned that eggplant carried harmful qualities and had to be ripe and cooked before eating. They linked it to heat, dryness and an excess of black bile, which they blamed for a wide range of health problems. If its "salt" was removed, or it was cooked in oil or vinegar, they wrote that it gained healthy attributes. That tradition still echoes in Iran today, where the fruit is described as "considered rather dangerous... a cook in Tehran will say that the poison must be taken out". Eggplant seeds have also been used there as an expectorant to relieve asthma and catarrh.

  Modern medicine has found a smaller but real basis for caution. A 2008 study of 741 people in India reported that nearly 10 percent had some allergic symptoms after eating eggplant, and 1.4 percent showed symptoms within two hours. People who are atopic, meaning genetically predisposed to certain allergic reactions, are more likely to react, perhaps because the fruit is high in histamines. Thorough cooking seems to prevent reactions in some people, but certain allergenic proteins may survive it. A 2021 review named four possible mechanisms: lipid transfer protein, profilin, polyphenol oxidase and pollen reactions.

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• 4. Roads From Asia

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  In 59 BCE, the Chinese poet Wang Bao wrote the "Slave's Contract" (僮約; tóng yuē), which holds the earliest known mention of the eggplant. Later sources followed, including the agricultural treatise Qimin Yaoshu, completed in 544 CE. The plant has been cultivated in southern and eastern Asia since prehistory. No one agrees on its place of origin. It has been described as native to South Asia, where it still grows wild, or to Africa.

  Genetics offers a clearer picture of its ancestry. Eggplant was domesticated from the wild nightshade known as thorn or bitter apple, Solanum incanum. There were probably two independent domestications, one in South Asia and one in East Asia. Wild fruits measure less than 3 cm across, far smaller than the cultivated forms.

  The vegetable reached Europe through the Iberian Peninsula, where it became a staple among Muslim and Jewish communities. Ancient Greek and Roman names for it are missing, while Arabic and North African names abound. That pattern suggests Arabs cultivated it around the Mediterranean in the early Middle Ages, and that it arrived in Spain in the 8th century. In 12th-century Muslim Spain, Ibn Al-Awwam described in an agricultural book how to grow aubergines. Records appear later in medieval Catalan and Spanish, and in 14th-century Italy. Eggplant stayed popular in Spain and had a limited presence in southern Italy, but elsewhere in Europe it remained relatively obscure until the 17th century.

  England did not record the aubergine until the 16th century. An English botany book of 1597 described the "madde or raging Apple" growing in London gardens, where it bore flowers but was caught by approaching winter. In one "extraordinarie temperate yeere" it produced fruit the size of a goose egg, "but never to the full ripenesse".

  Europeans later carried the plant across the Atlantic. In the Americas, the tomato, chili pepper and potato had already been growing, though all are nightshade cousins of the eggplant, which is a Eurasian plant.

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• 5. Anatomy of a Berry

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  The eggplant grows between 40 and 150 cm tall, with a spiny stem and large, coarsely lobed leaves measuring 10 to 20 cm long and 5 to 10 cm broad. Semiwild types can reach 225 cm, with leaves over 30 cm long and 15 cm broad. It is a delicate tropical perennial, though gardeners in temperate climates often treat it as a tender or half-hardy annual. The flowers range from white to purple, with a five-lobed corolla and yellow stamens. Its genome is packed into 12 chromosomes.

  Botanists classify the fruit as a berry, and inside it sit numerous small, soft, edible seeds. Common cultivars are egg-shaped, glossy and purple, with white flesh and a spongy, "meaty" texture. Cut flesh turns brown quickly in air. The cause is the oxidation of polyphenols, of which chlorogenic acid is the most abundant in the fruit. The purple skin owes its color to an anthocyanin called nasunin.

  Between the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India, larger cultivars weigh up to a kilogram, or 2.2 pounds. Elsewhere in India and Asia the fruit comes in white, yellow, green, reddish-purple and dark purple. Some show a gradient from white at the stem to bright pink, deep purple or even black. Chinese cultivars tend to be shaped like a narrow, slightly pendulous cucumber. Europe and North America favor elongated ovoid fruit with dark purple skin, such as 'Black Beauty'. Gardeners can also find bicolored heirlooms like 'Rosa Bianca' and striped types like 'Listada de Gandia' and 'Udumalapet'. Botanists name three varieties: esculentum, the common aubergine; depressum, the dwarf aubergine; and serpentium, the snake aubergine.

  Taxonomists struggled with this plant for generations. Older literature lists it under junior synonyms such as Solanum ovigerum and Solanum trongum. It was sometimes treated as a variety of Solanum aethiopicum, the scarlet and Ethiopian eggplants known as gilo and nakati. Dunal's work even described it as Solanum esculentum, a name also applied to the potato.

  Nutritionally the fruit is modest. Raw eggplant is 92 percent water, 6 percent carbohydrate and 1 percent protein, with negligible fat. Only manganese reaches a moderate level, at 10 percent of the Daily Value.

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• 6. Kitchens of Asia

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  Raw eggplant can taste bitter and astringent, but cooking makes it tender and develops a rich, complex flavor. Cooks often rinse, drain and salt the slices first to draw out the bitterness. The fruit soaks up cooking fats and sauces, which is why it so readily takes on the character of a dish. Skin and seeds are edible, though the green calyx at the top must be removed. It can be steamed, stir-fried, barbecued, roasted, stewed, curried, pickled or stuffed, and its bulk makes it a meat substitute in vegan and vegetarian cooking.

  In China the fruit is called qiézi (茄子). Deep-fried versions include yúxiāng-qiézi, meaning fish fragrance eggplant, and di sān xiān, meaning three earthen treasures. In Yunnan, the Dai people barbecue or roast it, then split it and eat it with garlic, chilli, oil and coriander. Some cooks remove the flesh and pound it in a mortar to serve with rice. Japan uses the same characters, read as nasu or nasubi, and grills slices for hasamiyaki, which are filled with a meat stuffing. Koreans call it gaji and serve it as banchan, in dishes such as namul, bokkeum and jeon.

  Filipinos know the long, slender purple kind as talong. It appears in stews and soups such as pinakbet, but the favorite is tortang talong, an eggplant grilled, dipped in beaten egg and pan-fried. It is served with the stalk still attached. Rellenong talong stuffs it with meat and vegetables, ensaladang talong makes a salad of the grilled and skinned fruit, and adobong talong simmers diced pieces in vinegar, soy sauce and garlic.

  India is among the plant's native lands, and its cooks describe the eggplant as the "king of vegetables". It goes into sambar, the tamarind lentil stew, and into dalma from Odisha, chutney, vankai curry and achaar pickle. Roasted, skinned and mashed with onions, tomatoes and spices, it becomes baingan bharta, or gojju. In Odisha, West Bengal and Bangladesh, the charred pulp is called begun-pora and is mixed with raw shallot, green chilies, salt, coriander and mustard oil. Maharashtra's bharli vangi stuffs small brinjals with ground coconut, peanuts, onions, tamarind, jaggery and masala spices. Maharashtra and neighboring Karnataka also make a vegetarian pilaf called vangi bhat.

  Jain households are the notable exception. Jainism strictly prohibits eating eggplant, following the religion's principle of nonviolence, called ahimsa. Classical Jain taxonomy treats the dense, multi-seeded fruit as likely to harbor mobile insects, called trasa jiva, and microscopic life called nigoda. Some traditions go further and call the plant ananthkay, a body holding an infinite number of microscopic souls. West of India, the fruit meets olive oil, walnuts and yogurt.

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• 7. Mediterranean and Persian Tables

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  The Spanish dish escalivada in Catalonia calls for strips of roasted aubergine, sweet pepper, onion and tomato. In Andalusia, thin slices are deep-fried in olive oil and served hot with honey as berenjenas a la Cordobesa. La Mancha pickles a small eggplant in vinegar, paprika, olive oil and red peppers, producing the berenjena of Almagro in Ciudad Real. Elsewhere around the Mediterranean, the fruit is stewed in ratatouille or fried for parmigiana di melanzane. Turkey adds imam bayıldı, which is vegetarian, and karnıyarık, which is filled with minced meat. Greek, Turkish and Levantine cooks make moussaka. Charred and blended with lemon, tahini and garlic, the pulp becomes baba ghanoush, melitzanosalata, zaalouk or Romanian salată de vinete. Romania also makes zacuscă, and the Balkans make ajvar or pinjur. Georgian cooks fry slices and fill them with walnut paste for nigvziani badrijani, while Levantine makdous stuffs pickled fruit with red peppers and walnuts.

  In medieval Spain, eggplant was closely tied to Jewish cooking. The 13th-century Andalusian cookbook Kitāb al-Ṭabikh features eggplant as the main ingredient in fifteen of its nineteen vegetable dishes. Jewish communities made it into almodrote, a casserole of eggplant and cheese. Such dishes became identifiers for Jews during their expulsion from Spain and the Inquisition, and the expelled carried them to the Ottoman Empire. There the classic Judaeo-Spanish song "Siete modos de gizar la berendgena" listed seven ways of preparing it. Eggplant remains a defining ingredient of Sephardic Jewish cuisine today.

  In Iran, the ideal eggplant is long, straight, firm and black, and unlike in Greece, Turkey or North Africa it is cooked peeled, usually with cinnamon or turmeric. Most dishes count as nankhoreshi, meaning they are eaten with bread, and they often appear as snacks alongside alcoholic beverages. The 14th-century poet Boshaq At'ema mentions burani-e badenjan, with eggplant sautéed with onions and turmeric, slowly cooked and mixed with yogurt. Kashk, a condensed whey, pairs with eggplant in kashk o badenjan. Mast o badenjan, known as nazkhatun in Tehran, combines eggplant, yogurt and dried mint. Stews include khoresht-e badenjan with lamb and mosamma-ye badenjan with chicken and either unripe grapes or pomegranate juice. Badenjan-polow comes from Fars and Kerman, and northern Iran has badenjan-e qasemi, a casserole with grilled eggplant, garlic, tomatoes and eggs.

  Summer's last month is when Iranians choose eggplants to store for winter. Peeled fruit is salted and left to "sweat", then hung on a line to sun-dry and rehydrated 24 hours before cooking. Alternatively, peeled fruit is cooked in oil, packed into a copper pot and covered with hot oil "which congeals to seal them". Al-Razi used the color of eggplant as a shorthand for purple in the 9th century, which suggests dark purple types were widely grown then. The Ain-i-Akbari of Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak records Iranian markets selling the vegetable all year at 1.5 dams per seer, a cheap price at that time.

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• 8. Fields, Pests, and Engineering

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  Eggplant prefers hot weather, and in cold climates or low humidity the plants languish or fail to set mature fruit. Growers in temperate regions start seeds eight to 10 weeks before the expected frost-free date and transplant after all danger of frost has passed. Plants need 45 to 60 cm between them and 60 to 90 cm between rows. Mulch conserves moisture and keeps down weeds and fungal diseases, and some shade helps in the hottest part of the day. Shaking the flowers by hand improves the set of the first blossoms, since each flower holds both male and female parts. Because the stems are somewhat woody, growers cut the fruit just above the calyx. Solanum melongena even appears on a list of low flammability plants suited to a building protection zone.

  The pests of tomatoes, capsicums and potatoes also trouble eggplants, so they should not follow their relatives in the same ground. Four years should separate successive eggplant crops. Whiteflies are a particular weakness, so growers sometimes plant a slightly less susceptible chili pepper nearby as a sacrificial trap crop. Potato beetles, flea beetles, aphids and spider mites are common North American pests, and Verticillium is the most serious fungal disease. The potato tuber moth, Phthorimaea operculella, lays eggs on the leaves, and the hatched larvae eat away at the mesophyll. In South Asia, several phytoplasmas cause little leaf of brinjal, spread by the leafhopper Hishimonus phycitis.

  Bt brinjal is a transgenic eggplant carrying a gene from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. It was designed to resist the brinjal fruit and shoot borer, Leucinodes orbonalis, and the fruit borer, Helicoverpa armigera. After protests against its regulatory approval in 2009, India's Environment Ministry imposed a moratorium on cultivation on the 9th of February 2010. The ministry said it would last "for as long as it is needed to establish public trust and confidence". The decision was controversial because it departed from how other genetically modified crops in India had been handled. Bangladesh approved Bt brinjal for commercial cultivation in 2013.

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