The word aubergine travelled from Tamil country through Persia, Arabia and Spain
Eggplant, aubergine, brinjal, melanzana: one vegetable, a tangle of names that all but one trace to a single ancient Dravidian word from southern India. Along the way the Sanskrit form came to mean something like a remedy for wind, and an Italian pun gave rise to the belief that eating it drove people mad.
Solanum melongena belongs to the nightshade family and is a cousin of tomatoes, chillies and potatoes, but unlike them it comes from Eurasia rather than the Americas. Botanically its fruit is a berry. It was domesticated from the wild bitter apple, probably twice, once in South Asia and once in East Asia, though its homeland is still debated. World production reached 61 million tonnes in 2023, with China and India growing 85 percent.
The plant is a tender tropical perennial with often spiny stems, usually grown 40 to 150 centimetres tall. Its white-to-purple flowers produce fruit whose seeds taste bitter from nicotinoid alkaloids, the same chemical family found in its relative tobacco. Wild fruits are under 3 centimetres across. The cut flesh browns quickly in air. Nutritionally it offers little, but its spongy flesh soaks up oil and flavour, which is why cooks love it.
The name eggplant, first recorded in 1763, described white varieties that really do resemble hens' eggs. Almost every other European name descends from the Arabic bāḏinjān, borrowed from Persian, which took it from an Indic form rooted in Dravidian; the Sanskrit version was read as the class of foods that remove windy humours. In al-Andalus the Arabic word became Spanish alberenjena, then French aubergine, reaching British English in the late eighteenth century. Portuguese traders carried their bringella around the world, so Indian English brinjal actually came home via Portugal. A separate branch entered Greek by the eleventh century and gave Italian melanzana and the botanical Latin melongena, adopted by Linnaeus in 1753.
Italians twisted melanzana into mela insana, mad apple, and by the thirteenth century the idea that eggplants caused insanity had taken hold. An English herbal of 1597 described the raging apple from Egypt that flowered in London gardens but died before ripening. Europe got the plant through Iberia, where Muslim and Jewish communities made it a staple, and Europeans later took it to the Americas.
Source: Eggplant
