Oddly aubergine

I've come to love aubergines, but I'm not sure why. Their flavour is exceptionally mild, like mulch and damp dusting cloth. Raw, an aubergine has a texture akin to a woolly apple; its cooked flesh disintegrates into slimy mush or takes on a leathery sogginess. Its skin has no special perfume, neither does it have an appealing crispness or offer much else of gastronomic note.

But a slick of roasted aubergine has the most tantalising savouriness. There's something curiously un-vegetable about that pulpy fleshiness. No other food combines so majestically with olive oil or lends such a cooling meaty backnote.

Botanically speaking, it's a fruit. But I've never seen an emphatically sweet aubergine dish and they seem even more worthy of conceptual classification as vegetables than do tomatoes, corn or French beans.

The king of vegetables

They're most likely native to southern India, where people occasionally call the aubergine "king of vegetables" on account of its stalky crown. The fruit found general popularity across Asia a long time ago, and it was being grown in China — which produces a considerable proportion of the world crop — by the 5th century. Arab traders brought it east and it assumed a prominent and lasting role in Persian cuisine during the 1st millennium AD.

Philologists love the fact that you can trace the etymology of "aubergine" back to Sanskrit; we take our word directly from French. In much of the West Indies the fruit is called "brown jolly", a corruption of the Indian brinjal, itself from the Persian.

Notions and reasons

The Americans and Australians call aubergines "eggplants". As a child, I assumed this was based on the off-putting notion that their flesh is similar to the texture of cooked egg but it's actually because the first aubergines exported from Europe were off-white and the size and shape of eggs.

As a member of the nightshade family, the aubergine is related to tomatoes and potatoes, and like them, its leaves are poisonous. The Romans thought the aubergine was poisonous and called it "mala insana", the apple of insanity.

The Moors in Spain

The Moors, who probably influenced European gastronomy more than almost anyone, brought it to Spain, and it had reached Sicily by the 14th century.

Aubergines became relatively popular in southern Italy, establishing themselves in splendid dishes such as the Sicilian pasta alla norma and the melanzane parmigiana of Naples. Northern Europeans, though, were much slower to find a taste for them.

The so-called aubergine caviar is the effete French version of the infinitely better Arab dish, baba ghanoush. In England, aubergines didn't find general popularity until the 1960s, if indeed they've found it today. Moussaka might be the most familiar aubergine dish there: Britons tend to eat the Greek version, which is topped with savoury custard, most likely because it was the one Elizabeth David wrote for a recipe in A Book of Mediterranean Food from 1950.

With a pinch of salt

The odd cookbook still advises people to salt aubergines "to remove the bitterness", but modern cultivated varieties aren't especially bitter. Salting does, however, break down some of the cell walls in an aubergine and makes the fruit less susceptible to sponging up fearsome quantities of oil.

The late food writer Evelyn Rose believed it best to deep-fry aubergines as she argued the hot fat "seals" the exterior, keeping the inside moist and fleshy.

Fishy connection

"Aubergines are one of the greatest vegetables," says blogger Lizzie Mabbott, "but only if you cook them properly. A good frying in hot oil before braising in sauce ensures they're unctuous and velvety, as they are in one of my favourites, Sichuan fish fragrant aubergines." This excellent dish contains no fish and is named thus as its seasoning is more usually applied to fish.

The best bet

Nonetheless, aubergines are surely at their best in Middle Eastern cuisine. I prefer the Lebanese, tahini-based mouttabal to its relative baba ghanoush, and I love them cubed and threaded on a skewer with chunks of lamb for the barbecue.

Patlican biber is an outstanding Turkish dish which pairs aubergines with green peppers. But the best of all is certainly imam bayaldi, which means "the imam fainted", whether because the stuffed aubergines were so delicious or because he heard how much oil went into it, neither history nor legend relates.

Married to olive oil, astute spices or a tomatoey, vinegary acidity, an aubergine reveals its proper role in gastronomy. It's vegetarian meat.