Aubergine, Guinea Squash or Garden Egg; Call it what you want, but the tropical perennial we most commonly refer to as eggplant stands apart in the world of fruit. From the intense color of the fruit to the delicate tender texture of its insides, eggplant is favorite of News-Press storyteller Amy Bennett Williams in just about all of its culinary forms. Her fondness for this particular member of the nightshade family, however, isn’t shared by everyone in the Williams’ household.
You want to have things in common with your kids, don't you?
I do -- at least in this phase of my life as a parent (though I'm not naive enough to assume it'll always be thus). So it has come as a long series of shocks that my youngest son can't stand eggplant.
Now, this is no pedestrian "I don't like spinach" dinner table debate; passions run white hot on both sides.
Far as I'm concerned, eggplant is no ordinary vegetable (for one thing, it's a fruit).
It's art. It's history. It's dusk made flesh (and I much prefer its French sigh of a name: aubergine).
The union of sky and earth in winter sunsets is a long smudge of eggplant.
Eggplant shadows pool under old live oaks and creep up sabal palm trunks in the woods behind my house.
It settles in the muck at the bottom of my pond, where the ancient bass glides on his slow rounds.
Without even taking the first bite, the fruit itself is a visual feast, sheathed in slick patent leather skin. And inside, the pale meat, ribboned with veins of golden green seeds.
Perhaps it's no surprise that eggplants are sexual -- as in male and female. At the end opposite the stem, the dun scar left by the dropped flower is circular in females; oval in males.
Yet all of this sensual eccentricity is lost on my Nash, to whom I've served eggplant curried, grilled and swathed in tomatoes and cheese a la Grandma Louise.
Every time it appears on our table, it's the same.
Holding the fork between thumb and forefinger, face squinched with revulsion, he takes the one required bite, then winces, shaking his head like he's trying to forget the memory of a horror.
Early on, I asked him what it was he objected to so strenuously. "It's mucilaginous," he said.
Pleased as I was with his word choice, I pressed him further.
After all, one person's mush is another person's silky tenderness.
He told me he also was creeped out by the ghostly pale pulp and the myriad tiny seeds.
In the end, we've agreed to disagree.
No matter how I rhapsodize about sleek curves, creamy flesh and melting mouthfuls, he's unmoved.
But I haven't given up hope. Maybe after he falls in love for the first time, he'll come around.