Cult of the Aubergine

My fellow Americans. Friends. Compatriots. I posit to you that we, as a nation, have overlooked (and undercooked!) the humble aubergine. (Or eggplant, as we call it, but I prefer "aubergine," as that term is cognate to the word for said vegetable in pretty much every single language!)

I myself hated it as a youth. Then I traveled to Russia at 20 and was convinced to try it at a Georgian restaurant. I was told they cooked it much better than we did, and man did those eggplant rolls look amazing. (They so are, if you're wondering.) Imagine my surprise when instead of a densely spongy, slightly bitter mouthful I found it to be a rich and melt-in-your mouth... I don't know... amazingness. Nothing that tasty should be called a vegetable. I mean, I guess some people might find the way it looks unappealing, as bits are somewhat stringy and if you cut it just right the seeds look like they are eggs in a bizarre alien ovary (which I guess they sort of are), but the taste is just amazing and it always seems to me to taste much fattier than the amount of oil it's cooked in could account for (which, to an American, is a good thing :p).

Anyway, I am very happy that the Turks seem to share my batshit craziness for all things aubergine. I just had a very simple, cheap, but incredibly tasty meal of beef stewed with aubergine and rice at Meydan Döner near the metro. Also popular here is an aubergine kebab, which is basically aubergine stuffed with spiced ground meat and grilled. Sounds tasty.

So. I shall undertake a mission to proselytize the aubergine message, to convert others to adopt our favorite vegetable, to grow it in abundance (if we can get a bumper crop in containers on our garage in Wisconsin, I think you can grow it almost anywhere), and most importantly, to finally learn how to cook it well and to share that knowledge with others. (I've managed to cook okay eggplant before-- you have to leech out the bitterness-causing-stuff and then cook the crap out of it-- but I have always been too impatient to cook truly great eggplant. One day.)