On My Plate: Eggplant

Local eggplant – the subject of this week’s column – has been a frequent topic for me this time of the year. The theme has been consistent: I love crispy fried pieces but don’t want to deep fry them in a lot of oil, and I love eggplant parmesan, but constructing it is a time-consuming bother.

Every time I’ve written about crispy fried eggplant or eggplant parmesan, my cooking recommendations have changed. Do I coat pieces in flour or in breadcrumbs, dip pieces in egg or milk, coat with grapeseed oil or with olive oil or fry in a pan or bake in the oven? I guess I I haven’t found a sure-fire winner for cooking either of them. Anyway, this year I don’t feel like cooking either. Too heavy for this extremely hot and humid summer.

The choice this summer has been to slice the eggplant into disks, brush them with olive oil, place put them on foil and grill them for a few minutes on each side. The foil helps minimize charring, which is not a desirable outcome in this household. A problem this week: the night I planned to photograph grilled eggplant, the grill ran out of gas. So I baked the pieces at 425 degrees for 10 minutes and finished them in a frying pan at high heat, 2 minutes per side. In a photo, they look just like they were grilled.

Jennifer Bayne’s 7 Wonders Farm has had the best-looking and best-tasting eggplant in my memory. You can tell the quality of an eggplant by its cover: a dark, smooth and shiny skin is the sign of a good one.

I don’t recommend peeling local eggplant. The skin is flavorful, so the only reason to peel it is to remove residues from chemical applications. However, this is not an issue with local eggplant, because our growers follow organic practices even though they are not certified organic. Most recipes call for salting slices before cooking. Salting extracts bitterness from bitter old supermarket eggplants, but our freshly harvested local ones aren’t bitter – if anything, this year’s eggplants are almost excessively sweet.

Salting also extracts moisture from slices, facilitating the application of a coating for my beloved crispy deep-fried option. However, minimizing sodium intake is a priority in our household, and salting is not necessary for grilling the slices.

Eggplant is an ancient Asian food, having been first cultivated thousands of years ago in either South Asia or East Asia (sources disagree). Eggplant cultivation moved westward from India to Persia, Mediterranean lands, across Europe and to the Americas (possibly brought by Thomas Jefferson).

As evidence of the westward migration of eggplant, the Hindi, Sanskrit, Arabic, French and Spanish words are nearly identical, and the French version aubergine is used in British English.

Our odd American term eggplant derives from the light color and egg shape of some medieval varieties. The mystery is why we Americans alone in the world use the peculiar name eggplant instead of a variation of Hindi like everyone else.

When I was a student in London, my visiting parents took me and a couple of British friends to a Greek restaurant in Soho. When my mother suggested ordering eggplant, my friend said she hated it but loved aubergine, which she saw on the menu, not realizing they were the same thing. “We hate eggplant but love aubergine” has remained a family declaration ever since.

James Rubenstein is president of the Board of Directors for the Oxford Free Press and professor emeritus of geography at Miami University.