AgriCulture bloggers Peter Davies and Mark Scherzer are the owners of Turkana Farms in Germantown, NY. This week, Peter writes: Mark and I have had a busy few weeks here at Turkana Farms, struggling between showers and cloudbursts, sometimes in steady rains, to get our vegetable garden underway. Usually in a very muddy state, we have been moving seedlings we started in our greenhouse out to the garden and setting them in the very sodden ground. As usual our vegetable selection is quite a panoply, including: four varieties of heirloom tomatoes; haricot vert, romano, wax, and edamame beans; okra; parsley; Italian and Thai basil; red, green, and savoy cabbages; broccoli; cheese pumpkins; zucchini, acorn, trombocino, and spaghetti squash; cauliflower; chard; and on and on. Besides seedlings, we have directly planted seeds for fava beans and peas (well underway since mid-April), and in the past few weeks sweet corn, spinach, lettuces, endive, cucumbers, beets, and carrots. The winter and spring were so mild that for the first time in our Germantown garden we planted fava beans and peas directly in the garden in mid-April, and (as you can see in the photo above) they are flourishing and almost ready to bear. Despite what the rabid right may think, the seasons they are a-changing.
After just having moved two-and-a-half flats of eggplants from the greenhouse and setting them out in two neat rows, I find that it is this vegetable that is, at present, very much on my mind. Planting eggplant is not simple these days since, if the plants are to survive, I have to immediately erect a hoop house over the rows to seal them off from the voracious ground beetles, which, when I first started growing eggplants in Germantown, so decimated the eggplant seedlings that they dwindled rather than grew, often never reaching the fruit-bearing stage. After several years of miserable results I was ready to give up, depressed by the sad filigree these flea-like beetles made of the leaves, and invariably disappointed by the puny harvest. But I really love eggplant and see a real difference between freshly picked eggplant and the supermarket variety, so I persevered and turned to hoop house covers, which have proved to be the magical solution. I was not always interested in eggplant. It was not until I was eight, when we moved from Wales to northern Illinois, that I realized there was such a thing. In wartime Britain eggplant apparently was not, given the climate and the Nazi blockade, readily available in the markets, being more of an import than a locally grown vegetable. That eggplant is more likely to be called aubergine in Britain suggests that France, in pre-war days, was the source.
In Illinois my American stepfather’s German mother, Minna, raised the white, goose egg-like variety, so the name “eggplant” made perfect sense to me. I would have been confused if I had first seen the oblong and long purple, black, and pink varieties, which are very un-egg like. Minna had only one-way of cooking eggplant: thinly slicing and flouring it, frying it in lard, and salt-and-peppering it. Although a rather finicky eater, I found this new food not bad, especially if it was fried to a crispy consistency, but I was not exactly blown away by it. It was not until I moved to Turkey for three years in, as they say, “my salad days,” that I really became passionate about eggplant, called patlican (paht lah jahn) there. All over Turkey, particularly in the Marmara/Aegean/Mediterranean regions, eggplant is central to the cuisine. It is said that Turks have at least 39 different recipes for preparing eggplant. In Turkish kitchens it can be pureed, grilled, roasted, baked, stewed, stuffed, pickled, and dried. As a measure of its popularity, it is generally accepted that many of the devastating fires that razed whole neighborhoods in old Constantinople (then built largely of wood) were the result of mishaps involving housewives frying eggplant.
While I am a fan of baba ganoush and moussaka and numerous other Turkish eggplant dishes, it is imam bayildi (translation: “the imam fainted”) that is probably at the top of my eggplant list. This is a stuffed eggplant dish made from eggplant halves that have been grilled or sauteed, slightly scooped out, and filled with a mix of onions, tomato/pepper sauce, and spices, and placed in the oven to bake with a topping (optional) of kasseri cheese. I have also had it with ground lamb. The first time I tasted the dish in Izmir it was I who almost bayildi. I had always assumed well into adulthood that, like the potato and tomato, eggplant was a New World food, which supposition has a certain logic, since these three plants are of the same family, the Solanaceae, or deadly nightshades. But no, eggplant is actually native to India, where it still grows wild. And seems to have been, since prehistoric times, an Asian vegetable. It is known to have been cultivated in China as early as the fifth century B.C. However, it was very slow to reach and find acceptance in Europe. Since there are no ancient Greek or Roman names for eggplant, it is thought that it was by way of the Arabs that it first reached North Africa, and, ultimately Italy, but this was not until the 14th century. It subsequently spread throughout Europe and was carried to the New World by European explorers.
At first eggplant was more likely to be found as a decorative plant in European flower gardens, and would not find acceptance into its cuisine until the 18th century. Apparently, the early varieties had an overly bitter taste, and this, together with its relationship to deadly nightshade, gave it the reputation of causing insanity, leprosy, and cancer. Once less bitter-tasting cultivars were developed in Europe, and its negative reputation faded, eggplant belatedly, but then very quickly, found an esteemed place in the cuisines of Europe, particularly in Italy, Turkey, Greece, and France. At present the leading growers of eggplant are Italy, Turkey, Egypt, China, and Japan. While my eggplants are in the ground and seem to be thriving I realize that it will be a long wait before I savor any of the fruits. (Eggplant is, strangely enough, technically classified as a berry.) If the past is any measure, it will not be till late July or early August. Although I now entertain — given something I learned in Wikipedia — hopes of speeding up the process. Apparently eggplant flowers are relatively unattractive to bees, and, as a result, the first blossoms often do not set fruit. This information corroborates something I had noticed over the years — that even after my plants began to flower, there was often a long wait before fruit began to form. The recommended solution is to speed up the fruit formation by hand pollination. I do love eggplant, but I am a busy bee myself, and am not sure about preempting what is usually the honey bee’s role. Do I have, I wonder, even with my passion for eggplant, the time and patience to go from blossom to blossom with a feather? Stay tuned. — Peter Davies
