I've come to love aubergines, but I'm not entirely sure why. Their flavour is exceptionally mild, like mulch and damp J-cloth. Raw, an aubergine has a texture akin to a woolly apple; its cooked flesh disintegrates into slimy mush or takes on a leathery sogginess. Its skin has no special perfume, neither does it have an appealing crispness or offer much else of gastronomic note.
But a slick of roasted aubergine has the most tantalising savouriness. There's something curiously un-vegetable about that pulpy fleshiness. No other food combines so majestically with olive oil or lends such a cooling meaty backnote.
Botanically speaking, it's a fruit. But I've never seen an emphatically sweet aubergine dish, and they seem even more worthy of conceptual classification as vegetables than do tomatoes, corn or French beans. They're most likely native to southern India, where people occasionally call the aubergine "king of vegetables" on account of its stalky crown. The fruit found general popularity across Asia a long time ago, and it was being grown in China – which produces a considerable proportion of the world crop – by the fifth century. Arab traders brought it east, and it assumed a prominent and lasting role in Persian cuisine during the first millennium AD.
Philologists love the fact that you can trace the etymology of "aubergine" back to Sanskrit; we take our word directly from French. In much of the West Indies the fruit is called "brown jolly", a corruption of the Indian brinjal, itself from Persian. The Americans and Australians call aubergines eggplants. As a child I assumed this was based on the offputting notion that their flesh is similar to the texture of cooked egg, but it's actually because the first aubergines exported from Europe were off-white and the size and shape of eggs.
As a member of the nightshade family, aubergine is related to tomatoes and potatoes, and like them its leaves are poisonous. It's also a close cousin of tobacco and contains more nicotine than any other vegetable, though you'd have to eat around 10 fruits to ingest the same amount of nicotine you would from spending three hours in a room filled with smoke. The Romans thought the aubergine was poisonous and called it "mala insana", the apple of insanity. The Moors, who influenced European gastronomy more than almost anyone, brought it to Spain, and it had reached Sicily by the 14th century.
Aubergines became relatively popular in southern Italy, establishing themselves in such splendid dishes as the Sicilian pasta alla norma and the melanzane parmigiana of Naples. Northern Europeans, though, were much slower to find a taste for them. So-called aubergine caviar is the effete French version of the infinitely better Arab dish, baba ghanoush. In England, aubergines didn't find general popularity until the 1960s, if indeed they've found it today. Moussaka might be the most familiar aubergine dish in this country: we tend to eat the Greek version, which is topped with savoury custard, most likely because it was the one Elizabeth David wrote a for recipe in the mega-influential A Book of Mediterranean Food from 1950.
The odd cookbook still advises people to salt aubergines "to remove the bitterness", but modern cultivated varieties aren't especially bitter. Salting does, however, break down some of the cell walls in an aubergine and make the fruit less susceptible to sponging up fearsome quantities of oil. The late Jewish food writer Evelyn Rose believed it best to deep fry aubergines as she argued the hot fat 'seals' the exterior, keeping the inside moist and fleshy.
"Aubergines are one of the greatest vegetables," says blogger Lizzie Mabbott, "but only if you cook them properly. A good frying in hot oil before braising in sauce makes sure that they're unctuous and velvety, as they are in one of my favourites, Sichuan fish fragrant aubergines." This excellent dish contains no fish and is named thus as its seasoning is more usually applied to fish.
Nonetheless, aubergines are surely at their best in Middle Eastern cuisine. I prefer the Lebanese, tahini-based mouttabal to its relative baba ghanoush, and I love them cubed and threaded on a skewer with chunks of lamb for the barbecue. Patlican biber is an outstanding Turkish dish which pairs aubergines with green peppers. But the best of all is surely imam bayaldi, "the imam fainted", whether because the stuffed aubs were so delicious or because he heard how much oil went into it, neither history nor legend relates. Married to olive oil, astute spices or a tomatoey, vinegary acidity, an aubergine reveals its proper role in gastronomy. It's vegetarian meat.
