We have got  a bumper crop of aubergines in the garden this year because they were  only thing that loved the intense heat and I’ve just finished cooking and freezing some of the surplus.  They seemed very exotic when I was growing up and I don’t think I ever saw one when I was a child. Certainly my grandfather didn’t grow them on his allotment, and probably wouldn’t have known what they were, but in fact they’ve been grown in Britain since the 16thc.

Aubergines are in the same family (the Solanaceae) as potatoes, tomatoes and peppers, but also tobacco and deadly nightshade. That might help explain why, like potatoes, tomatoes and peppers, they took a long time to enter our  diet and were probably first grown as ornamentals.

But do you know where they originated or how they have evolved?  I thought I knew but actually, as so often, I was way off track.

My first guess about origins was India, or possibly the Middle East because of the big role they play in cuisine there, but while there is written evidence backed up by genetic data to show that aubergines were first domesticated both  in India and China at least 2500 years ago that’s not actually where they originated. Recent research by the Natural History Museum in London, using DNA, discovered that in fact   most of the wild relatives of what is now the domesticated aubergine originated in north-eastern Africa around two million years ago. The original species is now thought to be extinct.

Somehow – and no-one knows how – as they dispersed they didn’t go  into northern Africa or the Mediterranean region,  which explains why there’s no sign of aubergines in classical Greek or Roman texts, nor in any early Middle Eastern or Egyptian sources. Instead these wild species spread  eastwards to tropical Asia, and into southern and western Africa. In India the dispersal gave rise to a species that scientists named Solanum insanum. This is a  small self-pollinating perennial shrub that’s very variable in shape, size and colouring, but normally very prickly and with very bitter fruit.[technically in fact they’re not fruit  but berries]  Rather than the familiar glossy purple they are usually  yellowish when  ripe. It is from populations of this wild species that the aubergine was later domesticated. Other sorts, equally weedy,  with small egg-like fruits grow across much of south-east Asia and southern China where they are first recorded as being cultivated or used medicinally in China from the 5thc BCE and in Sanskrit texts from about 300BCE.

For more on this see Solanum insanum …the neglected wild progenitor of eggplant (S. melongena L.): a review of taxonomy, characteristics and uses aimed at its enhancement for improved eggplant breeding

Aubergines arrived [along with oranges, lemons and limes] in southern Europe with  the conquering Arab armies of the powerful Damascus-based Umayyad caliphate which swept through north Africa into the Iberian peninsular in the 7th and 8thc.

These areas were  hot enough for aubergines to thrive outdoors as a garden crop, and by the 12thc aubergines were thoroughly established in Islamic agriculture with the Spanish Arab writer Ibn Al-Awwam  able to identify four cultivated varieties, white from Egypt,  violet from Syria, dark purple and black both from Andalusia.

These Arabic connections explain their name.  Working our way backwards, the word Aubergine reached English from 18thc French and got there from  the Catalan albergínia. or medieval Spanish alberengena.  The al beginning is the clue because al is the definite article in Arabic  and derives from  al-bādhinjān ‘the aubergine’. However even that’s not the origin of the word because  bādhinjān isn’t Arabic but was “borrowed”  from the  Persian bādenjān which itself comes from  Sanskrit vātiṅgaṇa and before that from one of the older Indian languages whose roots are now lost.

 

Aubergines make an appearance in Tacuinum Sanitatis an important  medieval text about health which derived from an 11th-century Arab  treatise by ibn Butlan of Baghdad.  It suggests that  aubergines were being grown for their supposed medical qualities.  There are many extant copies of the book indicating its popularity although, as we have seen in the French images above,  the illustrations accompanying the descriptions vary greatly in quality depending on the quality of the manuscript being copied.

By the following century aubergines were definitely being grown in northern Europe, but  as an exotic ornamental plant rather than for culinary purposes .

There is a very botanically accurate image in a copy of Tacuinum dating from 1415 which shows a row of  4 plants  labelled “Melongiana” which have realistic leaf shapes, fruit and calyx size, and each has glossy purple  egg-shaped fruits at different stages of growth.  Of course there are some difficulties in scale: in most European climates plants are very unlikely to reach the height an adult human, and they are usually more branched in form but it seems pretty clear these were drawn from. life.

By the mid-16thc and the arrival of printed herbals things have started to change. Leonhardt Fuchs’s Herbal De Historia Stirpium of 1542  describes plants with  yellow fruits, and others with and purple fruits [clearly the person who hand coloured this copy knew better!] and informs readers  that it is common to eat them prepared with oil, salt and pepper, like chanterelles.

 

In his Herbal of 1597 John Gerard explained “We had the same in our London gardens, where it hath borne floures; but Winter approaching before the time of ripening, it perished: neverthelesse it came to beare fruit of the bignes of a goose egg one extraordinarie temperate yeare, as I did see in the garden of a worshipfull merchant Master Harvie in Limestreet; but never to the full ripenesse.” [this was either Sir James Harvey, Lord Mayor in 1581 or his son Sir Sebastian who was Master of the Ironmongers].

 

At the same time somehow aubergines were  already attaining a reputation for being unsafe to eat. Gerard is certainly  wary perhaps for patriotic reasons as much as any sense of danger. Given this is not long after the defeat of the Spanish Armada and there was still high anti-Spanish feeling he noted that “the people of Tolledo do eate them with great devotion… to procure lust,” before going on to wish “that English men  content themselves with the meate and sauce of our owne countrey, rather than with fruite and sauce eaten with such perill  for doubtlesse these apples have a mischeevous qualitie, the use whereof is utterly to be forsaken.”  His advice was that “it is better to esteeme this plant and have him in the garden for your pleasure and the rarenesse thereof, then for any vertue or good qualities yet knowne.”

Despite appearing in herbals and in a few elite gardens aubergines remained rare in Northern Europe, and rarely feature in paintings.There is one exception to that: the work of  Arcimboldo in the mid-late 16th century but, as we have seen in an earlier  post Arcimboldo liked using new or strange plants including maze and curcubits to make his composite pictures.  These like the aubergine would have come from the imperial garden.In Summer a small purple aubergine forms the figure’s ear while a long pale fruit forms part of the neck, as it does in  his portrait of The Emperor Rudolph as Vertumnus, the god of gardens and vegetation who also has an aubergine earring.

So by the end of the 16th century Europe effectively had two histories of the same plant. In the Mediterranean — especially Iberia, southern Italy and  the Ottoman world— it had centuries of culinary use behind it. In northern Europe it was exotic, difficult to grow, botanically puzzling and vaguely dangerous.

By the time John Parkinson came to write  Theatrum Botanicum in 1640 he was able to describe four main kinds of ” Madde Apples” one of which, “the Madde Apple of Syria”, was the aubergine.  He’s clear about their membership of the same family as tomatoes  describing them both in the same section.  However he also gave a whole list of instructions on how to cook them.

Nevertheless they didn’t catch on in the northern European kitchen and instead continued just to be grown as tender ornamental plants

When Linnaeus came to classify them in Species Plantarum in 1753, he knew they were in the same family as tomatoes, potatoes and nightshades, and called them Solanum melongena from the Latin solamen, which means “comforting” or “soothing,” referring to the calming properties of some nightshade plants, and  the old Italian term mela insana,  literally “mad apple.”

By the eighteenth century the situation is much clearer. Philip Miller’s The Gardeners Dictionary includes aubergines under Melongena and by the 8th edition in 1763 distinguishes several forms according to fruit shape, size and prickliness, one of which he had grown from seeds sent from India.

One of  Miller’ s herbarium specimen labelled Melongena ovata survives in the Natural History Museum,  Modern taxonomists have re-examined Miller’s account and conclude that these aren’t separate species but different cultivated forms of Solanum melongena — essentially all aubergines distinguished principally by fruit shape and other characteristics.

Miller also tells his readers  that Melongena  “grows naturally in Asia, Africa, and America, where the fruit is commonly eaten by the inhabitants ; and it is cultivated in the gardens in Spain as an esculent fruit, by the title of Barenkeena ;  the Turks who also eat the fruit, call it Badinjan, the Italians Melanzana, and the inhabitants of the British islands in America, Brown John, or Brown Jolly.”   But he adds the fruit is “seldom eaten in this country.”

Around the same time aubergines start appearing in the catalogues of seed and nursery  businesses but as Melongena in the ornamental flower section rather than the culinary or vegetable section. For example John Webb’s 1760 Catalogue of Seeds and Hardy Plants includes two forms:  an egg-plant with white and another with purple fruit, with both recommended for hothouse conditions. A similar pairing and listing occurs in the catalogues of  Luker, Smith & Lewis c.1780, and James Gordon and others.

However there is no sign of the word aubergine anywhere in an English text, until according to the Oxford English Dictionary, 1796 when  they appear in an account of an expedition to Surinam. And if that sounds a bit odd, as it did to me, it’s thought that aubergines had been introduced by the Spanish to their empire in South America in the mid-seventeenth century.

They’re no real sign of aubergine in any British cookery books as far as I can see right through until well into the 19th century. The change might have had something to do with the Horticultural Society of London, which in the 1820s  was experimenting with “Esculent Egg Plants” at their garden in Chiswick, including seeds of at least 8 kinds that had been sent over by the East India Company from Bengal.

In 1826 Andrew Mathews wrote a paper reporting on this which was published in the Society’s  Transactions in 1830.  In it he summed up the state of play at the time: “In this country, the egg-plant, brinjal, or aubergine, is chiefly cultivated as a curiosity; but in warmer climates, where its growth is attended with less trouble, it is a favourite article of the kitchen-garden. In the form of fritters, or farces, or in soups, it is frequently brought to table in all the southern parts of Europe; and forms a pleasant variety of esculent.”  He goes on to include a recipe which involved for salting, draining, peppering, breadcrumbing and frying them in butter.

He also explained the cultivation methods which were “quite elaborate by ordinary vegetable-garden standards. Seed was sown in pots in a hot-bed frame early in spring; the seedlings were individually potted and returned to the frame; when about 9–10 inches tall they were planted outside at the foot of a south-facing wall.” However  only two fruited:  the Round Purple and the Long Purple.

The  Gentleman’s Magazine March 1827 carried a letter on the same theme: “There is an esculent vegetable, now much used in Paris, called the aubergine or melongène, of which there are two varieties, viz. violette longue et violette ronde.—If any Correspondent should be acquainted with this vegetable, and will favour the public with a description of it, its cultivation, and the mode of preparing it for the table, an obligation will be conferred on many readers of your widely-circulated magazine.”  AS far as I can see no-one took up the challenge.

Yet by the later Victorian period it is certainly there. Mrs Beeton Household Management include recipes such as Egg Plant, with Poached Eggs, explicitly glossed in French as Aubergines aux Oeufs Pochés. But its really only in the later 20th century when British cookery began to seriously embrace “foreign” ideas with writers such as Elizabeth David  Constance Spry Jane Grigson,  Claudia Roden, and Madhur Jeffrey that the aubergine took its now much more prominent place in our cuisine.

Of course part of the reason that aubergines were late to our tables was that the fruit used to be really bitter and required a lot of careful preparation, especially by salting – and the plants were prickly.  But over the years the prickles and spines and more importantly the bitterness of the wild fruit has been bred out and what’s been bred in is size.

For more on how some of that’s been done see this article from The natural History Museum.

Once that was sorted  it was just a short step  to wanting to have them in our greenhouses and gardens. Given climate change and the fact aubergine plants are easy to grow and can produce abundant crops I suspect we’re going to see a lot more of them… and then we could all be enjoying Fanny Craddock’s aubergine haggis recipe…although personally much though I love aubergines I’d probably rather not!