Consider the aubergine

[Nick Armstrong]

Jamie Oliver visited a family of Iranian origin living in Yorkshire (in the C4 prog about Great British food this evening) and was helping them cook a dish (the name starting with M escaped me) based on aubergines smoked in their skins over a flame, then peeled and the flesh mashed up and simmered with tomatoes and garlic and herbs. It got my juices flowing....

[Pabmusic]

My wife is from The Philippines, where aubergine (egg plant, of course) is an important food. Almost the most simple dish I know is to heat the aubergine over a naked flame till it's soft, then squash it flat with a fork, dip it in a mixture of egg, salt and pepper, and fry it. Delicious!

By the way, a common variety grown in the Philippines really does resemble eggs (about the size of small hens' eggs, and white). Aubergine is a member of the nightshade family (I'm pretty sure), which also includes the potato, the tomato, the bell pepper, the chilli, and tobacco, as well as deadly nightshade.

[Anna]

our favourite book is Arto der Haroutunian's Vegetarian Dishes from the Middle East, now an expensive rarity on Amazon/Abe Books.

Totally agree, I have an old copy of that, picked up secondhand, but it was reissued in hardback 2008, just checked and available from Amazon. I also have the Madhur Jaffrey and a Claudia Roden.

[MickyD]

Our local aubergines in Provence are fabulous - for eating, I mean. As for the other uses mentioned here, "I couldn't possibly comment."

[MrGongGong]

Asian food shops sell the little round ones (white as well as purple ) which are very easy to grow and more tasty than the massive hydroponically grown Dutch varieties that you get in the supermarkets

[salymap]

Well, 35 posts on this versatile vegetable. I shouldn't think peas, carrots and spuds, my almost staple diet in veg now, have as many uses.But who knows..........

[MrGongGong]

aaah there are spuds and there are spuds
as MrsGong will tell you ......... this year we have some Shetland black as well as Charlotte and Pink Fir Apple and .........................

[Anna]

We used to get those lovely black and purple Scottish potatoes here but no longer (I assume they weren't popular enough?) but Pink Fir Apple are available. After not being much of a potato eater I've recently discovered the joy of spuds. As to vegetables I could not do without, I confess the humble cabbage is the one I love the most.

[vinteuil]

Hobson-Jobson* provides a pleasantly copious etymology for aubergine -

BRINJAUL, s. The name of a vegetable called in the W. Indies the Egg-plant, and more commonly known to the English in Bengal under that of bangun (prop. baingan). It is the Solanum melongena, L., very commonly cultivated on the shores of the Mediterranean as well as in India and the East generally. Though not known in a wild state under this form, there is no reasonable doubt that S. melongena is a derivative of the common Indian S. insanum, L. The word in the form brinjaul is from the Portuguese, as we shall see. But probably there is no word of the kind which has undergone such extraordinary variety of modifications, whilst retaining the same meaning, as this. The Sanskrit is bhantaki, Hindi bhanta, baigan, baingan, Persian badingan, badilgan, Arabic badinjan, Spanish alberengena, berengena, Portuguese beringela, bringiela, bringella, Low Latin melangolus, merangolus, Italian melangola, melanzana, mela insana, &c. (see P. della Valle, below), French aubergine (from alberengena), melongène, merangène, and provincially belingène, albergaine, albergine, albergame. (See Marcel Devic, p. 46.) Littré, we may remark, explains (dormitante Homero?) aubergine as ‘espèce de morelle,’ giving the etym. as “diminutif de auberge” (in the sense of a kind of peach). Melongena is no real Latin word, but a factitious rendering of melanzana, or, as Marcel Devic says, “Latin du botaniste.” It looks as if the Skt. word were the original of all. The H. baingan again seems to have been modified from the P. badingan, [or, as Platts asserts, direct from the Skt. vanga, vangana, ‘the plant of Bengal,’] and baingan also through the Ar. to have been the parent of the Span. berengena, and so of all the other European names except the English ‘egg-plant.’ The Ital. mela insana is the most curious of these corruptions, framed by the usual effort after meaning, and connecting itself with the somewhat indigestible reputation of the vegetable as it is eaten in Italy, which is a fact. When cholera is abroad it is considered (e.g. in Sicily) to be an act of folly to eat the melanzana. There is, however, behind this, some notion (exemplified in the quotation from Lane’s Mod. Egypt. below) connecting the badinjan with madness. [Burton, Ar. Nights, iii. 417.] And it would seem that the old Arab medical writers give it a bad character as an article of diet. Thus Avicenna says the badinjan generates melancholy and obstructions. To the N. O. Solanaceae many poisonous plants belong. ... "

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson-Jobson

[MrGongGong]

We used to get those lovely black and purple Scottish potatoes here but no longer (I assume they weren't popular enough?) but Pink Fir Apple are available. After not being much of a potato eater I've recently discovered the joy of spuds. As to vegetables I could not do without, I confess the humble cabbage is the one I love the most.

You can still get most varieties if you grow your own

http://www.marshalls-seeds.co.uk/seed-potatoes-cid402.html?gclid=CKTpidfJl6wCFUtB4Qodtm0BxA

[Don Petter]

Well, 35 posts on this versatile vegetable.

Impressive, but not quite as tricky as the Lord's prayer on the head of a pin.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/w...ds/8539726.stm

[Nick Armstrong]

Are we going to get a rash of vegetable threads now, following the unlikely runaway success of Lateral's aubergine initiative. He's been conspicuously silent on the subject since then - why start this I wonder? An experiment?

[Don Petter]

Are we going to get a rash of vegetable threads now, following the unlikely runaway success of Lateral's aubergine initiative.

'Essential Vegetables' with a guest fertilizer each week?

[MrGongGong]

Surely it's not a "rash" of threads but a "crop" ???

[Pabmusic]

[B]It looks as if the Skt. word were the original of all.

Here's Michael Quinion on the etymology.http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-egg1.htm

[I'm now editing this to include an aside. The French word 'aubergine' is ultimately from the Arabic 'al-badinjan' (which is clearly related to 'brinjal'). I suspect the French corrupted the Arabic into something that looked familiar: auberge. This is exactly the same process that produced the English 'rosemary' from the Latin 'ros marinus' - 'sea dew'.]