If you look back on the things you liked as a kid and compare it to the things you like now you will notice some interesting contrasts. For example, any normal seven-year old human male, given a choice between spending time naked in a hot tub with a centerfold model or with a live toad in a sandbox will go for the frog reflexively
To your seven-year old taste buds a sip of your dad’s beer made you wonder how anybody could actually drink that stuff. A dozen years later you were buying kegs of it to guzzle at weekend parties. So as you get older you find that you love some of the things you used to hate. This applies especially to food.
I once thought I would never live long enough to like eggplant. I also thought the same thing about beer. There was nothing my mother could do to eggplant to make it taste like food. Many years later I enjoyed some at a friend’s house without knowing what it was and have loved it since.
Eggplant was in use as long ago as 2,000 BC by people in that region of south Asia which includes China and Burma. It didn’t reach American shores until the Spaniards unloaded some in Florida in the early 1600’s. However, believe it or not, it remained undiscovered by Americans until 1806. That’s when Thomas Jefferson planted some in his garden at Monticello. He had enjoyed “roasted eggplant with garlic and sesame seeds” while serving as an ambassador to France in 1784, and brought some seeds back with him.
You could be forgiven for wondering if there was anything Jefferson didn’t get around to doing. When he wasn’t inventing machines or representing his country in Europe, writing the Declaration of Independence, building a university or making the Louisiana Purchase, he was busy raising over 200 varieties of fruits and vegetables in an incredible garden which you can visit even now.
You Can Do This
Set your oven to 350 (F)
Peel and cut one large eggplant into cubes and boil for 20 minutes while you finely dice a medium-sized onion and peel one pound of raw shrimp.
Drain the cooked eggplant in a colander, reserving about a quarter-cup of the liquid.
In a bowl put the cubed eggplant, the peeled shrimp, the diced onion, a half-cup Parmesan cheese, a melted stick of butter, 5 beaten eggs, a half-cup of fine bread crumbs, black pepper to taste, the quarter-cup of reserved liquid and a walnut-sized glob of chicken base paste (replaces salt with better flavor). Mix well.
Pour this into a baking dish and top with a half-cup mixture of bread crumbs and Parmesan cheese. Garnish with a sprinkle of paprika and bake for 50 minutes. Allow to “set” for 15 minutes then serve hot.
“How about a side of Jefferson Fries with that burger”
Yes, he also introduced America to what he awkwardly called “potatoes fried in deep fat while raw, first having been cut into small strips” or what we know as French fries, which he discovered, again, in France. Apparently, some experts claim that fries originated in Belgium and, while that is either true or not, nobody calls them “Belgian fries.”
You can imagine that Jefferson, a reserved man in politics and manners, might be a real hoot to cook with in his own kitchen, even if he weren’t actually stirring the pot but merely leaning against a counter top, sipping a Bordeaux and holding forth on clocks, architecture, wine, celestial navigation, diplomacy, medicine, the pruning of fruit trees, the pacifying of Indian tribes, the evolution of language, geography and the perils of big government.
As if that weren’t enough, Jefferson also brought to our shores the plan for the first pasta machine, thus initiating our long love affair with macaroni and cheese. He made his own pasta at Monticello from that machine, his drawing of which now is in the Library of Congress.
Thomas Jefferson’s kitchen reflected an appreciation for the finer foods of France, Italy and his native America and he made certain they were always on the menu. From his home in Virginia, he brought along an aspiring cook named James Heming with him to France. Heming was only 19 at the time and spent the next three years apprenticed to Parisian chefs learning the intricacies of haute-cuisine. He took charge of the kitchen at Jefferson’s home on the Champs-Elysees, serving his culinary creations to ambassadors, scientists and European nobles. Returning to America, Heming became Jefferson’s chef both at the capitol in Philadelphia and at Monticello.
The cultivation and consumption of eggplant is thought to have originated in Persia (Iran) only to wind up in Italy where it is wonderfully transformed into eggplant parmigiana. Eggplant parmigiana, by the way, is one of only four foods from Earth that you will find served in Heaven. This is an assumption, of course, but it is based on what we have learned over the millennia about both Heaven and eggplants. I’ll tell you what the other three are in subsequent posts.
You can find numerous recipes for eggplant Parmesan on the web but a much simpler way to enjoy eggplants is to roast slices of them on the grill (skin on), having first rubbed them with salt, pepper and olive oil.
Guess what! You can also fry eggplant “in deep fat while raw, having first been cut into small strips”. I cut them into chunks, season them with salt & pepper then shake them in a bag with flour. They fry up quickly and are crisp on the outside and tender on the inside and you can do it with nothing more elaborate on hand than a simple fire extinguisher
Meanwhile, having exhausted the available literature on eggplants, I can tell you that no wars were ever fought over eggplants, no prominent people in history were ransomed for eggplants, eggplants were never used for currency anywhere and no mass extinctions ever occurred because of eggplants. Nobody will ever make a movie about an eggplant. I could be wrong but I’m not.
So, yes, they are boring. The taste is anything but.
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