Eggplant Season

Eggplant is one of those vegetables that people often think of as seasonless. Certainly specimens of indifferent quality can be found at the grocery store in every season. But if you are a gardener, you know that eggplant has a distinct season: late summer and early fall. Eggplant requires a long, hot growing season. Depending on your location, the farmers markets begin to fill with beautiful eggplant in July or August. You should be able to continue to find good eggplant for the rest of this month and into early October. I feel like we are at the peak right about now.

I point this out because I am aware that eggplant is a hard sell. And I want you to love eggplant. To begin, consider that often food aversions are the result of eating inferior examples of the food in question. This starts with consuming something out of season. It isn’t that you can’t get good examples of a food out of season…it just means you have to look more carefully to find the good.

A great example of this is one of eggplant’s relatives in the nightshade family: the tomato. There is nothing quite as delicious as a vine ripened summer tomato. They are best warm from your own garden (or that of a friend). The next best source is the summer farmers market. After that, those marked “vine ripened” during the summer months at the grocery store can be very nice too. Modern varieties that grow better in hot house conditions…in addition to improved and more efficient shipping…have made better tomatoes available out of season. But I think everyone knows the out of season tomatoes are a pale shadow of their summer selves. So it is with eggplant, too.

My hope for this issue of Notes is that even if you have never been an eggplant fan, that maybe after reading about it here, you will want to give it another try. Right now is the perfect moment.

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