Mom & The Eggplant: An Unrequited Love Affair

My mom never met an eggplant she didn’t murder. Which is really a shame. Because she loved eggplant dearly, particularly on her occasional visits to Israel. You might say that she never met an eggplant dish in Israel she didn’t love. Unfortunately, they didn’t love her back.

I think the root of the problem comes down to two basic but critical issues: Cultural differences were one. Salt was the other.

First of all, the eggplants mom would buy in the US and then prepare for us all at home were far different than the ones available in Israel. The American ones: Big, beautiful, heavy heavy heavy with water mostly, and bitter to beat the band. The Israeli species: much milder and tastier. So already we are dealing with a bit of a loaded deck here.

And then the issue of salt. Even with the Israeli varietal, unless you are doing some particular culinary treatment, the standard course of action is to salt eggplants liberally to extract both water and bitterness. But if you’re a health food advocate — which my mom most certainly was — and if you were worried about the salt intact of your family members — which she also was — this critical, salting step was simply ignored.

So the end result was an inferior eggplant species bereft of the typical salting technique landing on our dinner table with expected results: We all (literally) turned our noses up at whatever version she thought might work.

So, of course, drawing upon the logic of “skipped generations,” we can see what’s coming: An inordinate number of the vegetable dishes coming out of our soul food kitchen involve eggplant. I wasn’t even conscious of this until I started to write this post. But it’s true: The sins of the mother are indeed visited upon the ensuing generation.

Mom, wherever you are, I’m hoping I’m making amends.