The problem with eggplant

Rob Price

If you're like me, you like visiting outdoor farm markets in the fall. The fresh produce is rolling in: crates of zuchinni, bushels of tomatoes, apples and pears and bunches of basil. All of it bursting with freshness, and rich, fruity tastes, and, yes, wholesome fiber.

And then there's the eggplant.

I have a complicated relationship with eggplant, and I bet a lot of you do, too. The big purple eggplants have always alarmed me; they make me think of a large animal's stomach, lying along the side of some hunting trail.

On the other hand, some eggplant is white with beautiful streaks of red and pink. They're smaller, too, and look more manageable. I can at least imagine eating them, and it's for this reason my wife and I always buy one eggplant a year. And this always happens at this time of year, at some outdoor farmers market we wander into.

Once, several years ago, we actually cooked an eggplant. I don't remember how we cooked it, but it didn't taste bad. It tasted ... like eggplant, which doesn't really taste like much. Eggplant has a slightly chewy consistency, and generally acquires the flavors of whatever goop you cook along with it. We ate most of our eggplant that year, then looked curiously at each other.

"I don't think I really like eggplant," I recall saying.

"I think I could have cooked it better," said my wife, who is an excellent cook.

One trick with cooking eggplant, it seems to me, is leaching as much water from the meat as possible, so it doesn't become soggy during the cooking process. You can do this by cutting an eggplant into thin slices, then spreading salt across the slices and letting them sit for a couple hours. In other words, you have to give yourself some time when preparing eggplant; it's not something you can throw together in five minutes.

The other trick with eggplant, I think, is being willing to fry it at an extremely high heat. Assuming you've leached a lot of water from your slices of eggplant and you've dusted them in some flour, you have to heat your cooking oil to a really high degree, so that the eggplant browns quickly without becoming soggy from overcooking.

On the other hand, you could try grilling slices of eggplant. That is the thought that crossed my mind when my wife bought the annual eggplant - a lovely white oblong bulb - at a friendly farmer's market two weekends ago.

"It looks so beautiful," she said. "If only we liked it," I said.

"I like it," my wife insisted.

"Let's try grilling it," I suggested. "Then let's drizzle some good olive oil and vinegar over it."

"That sounds delicious," my wife said.

It sounded delicious, indeed: elegantly simple; something we could look forward to turning into a great dinner or weekend lunch - if only we really liked eggplant. Two or three days later, the eggplant remained in our refrigerator,

and I noticed my wife looking up eggplant recipes in a stack of Italian cookbooks - a sure sign our eggplant progress was stalling.

But we kept at it, finding a recipe that called for cutting an eggplant into small cubes, then mixing it with bread crumbs and parmesan cheese and frying it - over very high heat.

"That sounds good," I said. "I can eat that."

My wife looked happy: We had a plan for the eggplant. But that was several days ago, and the eggplant is still sitting in our refrigerator, a lonely legume amidst the celery and carrots, whose numbers decline steadily day by day. At this rate, the eggplant must be thinking, I'll be all alone in three or four days; then I suppose I'll just rot.

At this point, I'm giving our eggplant a 50-50 chance of becoming a meal. Last year, we kept the annual eggplant lying around until it had withered into a truly terrifying deformity. Then we admitted to ourselves there are some foods that just don't fit with our particular eating and cooking imaginations, and eggplant is one of them. So is liver.

If only we could recall this hard-won wisdom when the weather turns misty and the farmers bring their crops to market. Somehow all that fresh food - summer's last great shout of joy - puts a spell on us, makes us think there is nothing that won't taste great, even eggplant, as long as we know how to cook it.

Sometime this weekend my wife and I will wander into another farmers market. The peppers are coming in. We'll buy some of those, with a plan to stuff them with sausage. Perhaps we'll look fondly at the eggplant. But that will be all.