Eggplant (solanum melongena)
Originally grown in India, solanum melongena (known as eggplant or aubergine) spread to East Asia as early as 544 C.E., where its berry became a staple of the Chinese diet and agricultural system.[1] During the Arab Agricultural Revolution of the high Middle Ages, the eggplant was transported west to North Africa and the Near East, where it was bred to reduce bitterness; from here, the eggplant subsequently traveled north across the Mediterannean to Italy and Spain.[2] In these countries, the eggplant became a popular ingredient with a distinctly “Moorish” culinary identity, as evidenced by Mestre Ruperto de Nola’s reference to traditional “Berenjenas a la morisca” in the early sixteenth-century Libro de guisados.[3]
The eggplant reached England by at least the late sixteenth-century, when botanist John Gerard documented it in his 1597 Herball, or, General Historie of Plantes (pictured below).[4] Calling them “Madde” or “Raging Apples” (from the Latin mala insana), the herbalist contended that eggplants possessed a “mischeevous qualitie,” and exhorted readers to use them only as ornamental herbs. (It was not until the nineteenth-century that popular English society would follow Parisian trends and express alimentary interest in the eggplant [5]). Combining humoral theory and an observational method of documenting solanum melogena, Gerard’s entry entangled a proto-scientific botany with the characteristic nationalism of Elizabethan England.
Gerard’s observation that the madde-apple “groweth in Egypt almost every where…bringing foorth fruite of the bignes of a great Cucumber” confirms Mestre Ruperto de Nola’s description of eggplant-based dishes as “morisca,” which adjective could reference either the Iberian Moors who brought the eggplant to Spain (to whom de Nola likely alludes [6]) or the contemporary “Moors” of the sixteenth century Barbary coast (whom Gerard references). Since Gerard published the Herbal in 1597, twelve years after Elizabeth I chartered the Barbary Company,[7] it is likely that his references to “Egypt and Barbarie” are a response to the influx of exotic luxury goods from North Africa. In light of this, one can read Gerard’s contrast between the madde-apple’s supposed ubiquity in Egypt (which he probably had from hearsay) and its fragility in London gardens as an argument for the plant’s value as a rare, luxury import. Moreover, the madde-apple’s flowers, according to Gerard, “open like a starre, with certaine yellowe…thrums in the middle.” This seductive, vibrant image frames the madde-apple as an African export to be placed among novel, exotic luxuries such as Moroccan sugar.
The beautiful fruit, however seductive or valuable it was considered, represented the unknown as well as the political and cultural Other, and its consumption was prohibited by what seems to have been simply English nationalism and xenophobia. Gerard noted that North Africans ate madde-apples “boiled or rosted…with oile, vinegar, and pepper,” but offered no reason for the fruit’s “mischeevous qualitie” other than that it was not of “our owne country [England]” and was therefore consumed with “perill.” From this specious warning, it can be understood that Gerard rejected fully objective, rational conclusions in favor of his own deeply fixed sense of xenophobia and nationalism. The first three lines of “The uses and danger” section directly indict the Spanish for consuming the madde-apple “with great devotion…to procure lust,” evincing the Hispanophobia characteristic of Elizabethan wartime propaganda. Foundational to this condemnation and the warning against consuming madde-apples is a dietetic belief that consumption of the madde-apple would make an Englishman as wanton as he imagines a Spaniard to be, because foods were believed to shape the temperaments of their consumers according to their humoral qualities. This prevailing notion necessitated a separation of English cuisine from the cuisine of its enemies or peoples seen as diabolic. Ignoring or repudiating its culinary popularity in other countries, Elizabethans did not prize the “madde-apple” for its taste; rather, they esteemed and consumed the plant as an import valuable only for its beauty and “rarenesse,” there being no “vertues or good qualities yet knowne.”
In the 1730s, the Regensburg apothecary and botanist Johann Wilhelm Weinmann (1683-1741) organized and completed the expansive Phytanthoza iconographia, an eight-volume herbal comprising approximately 1025 hand-colored engravings. Weinmann originally commissioned Georg Dionysius Ehret (1708-1770), who would become the foremost botanical illustrator of the eighteenth-century, to complete one thousand illustrations for the book. After a financial disagreement, however, Ehret quit and the remaining illustrations were completed by several engravers, including the popular artist Johann Jakob Haid (1704-1767). [8]
The engraving of eggplants pictured in figure 1 is most likely the work of Haid, as suggested by the small “H” in the lower right corner. Weinmann likely chose Haid as an illustrator due to his popular mezzotint portraits; using the mezzotint process, engravers could produce more accurate and richly textured prints. [9] Weinmann’s preference for mezzotint reflects both a desire to achieve greater scientific precision in botanical illustrations (an advancement of the seventeenth-century transition from woodcuts to metal engravings [10]) and a desire to imbue his collection’s illustrations with a cutting-edge stylistic grace.
The botanical function of the engraving itself is quite simple: Haid has depicted the eggplant in three stages of development, from flower to ripe fruit, in a downward-moving sequence. Practically speaking, since a botanist could use the illustration to identify the eggplant in any stage of development, this mode of illustration makes the engraving universally useful.
Undoubtedly, the engraving of eggplants is colorful and lifelike, with subtle gradations in tone and a highly detailed stalk. However, the engraving is also symptomatic of the botanical issues plaguing the herbal, as expressed by the eighteenth-century botanist Christoph Jakob Trew: “…it is really regrettable that the late Weinmann’s precious work had so many untrue, even faked images which gave it a bad name with those who are knowledgeable.”[11] Trew’s criticism of the “untrue” images can be understood as a criticism of the engravings’ lack of scientific practicality or visual integrity, especially given Trew’s post-Linnean methodology. The eggplant in Haid’s engraving certainly is not “depicted with its roots, stalks, leaves, flowers, seeds, and fruits” [12] as plants are in Gerard’s woodcuts (see figure 2) or in Leonhart Fuchs’ illustrations, which distinguishes Haid’s engraving from its pre-Linnean peers. At the same time, the engraving is also not demonstrative of a Linnean methodology. Introduced in the late 1730s, the Linnean taxonomy system identified and classified plants according to their sexual organs; in contemporary botanical art, this was reflected by a greater focus on depicting detailed flowers (particularly their stamens and pistils) rather than root-systems, leaves, and other minutiae. [13] The stamens and pistils in Haid’s engraving are painted a muddied yellow-orange and are not outlined finely enough to be distinguishable in number, size, or shape. While it is near impossible to tell whether Haid made this sacrifice for artistic reasons or hastily produced an ill-defined engraving, the dearth of precise details made the engraving scientifically inferior to contemporary, Linnean engravings that depicted the most particular characteristics of their botanical subjects.
Today, thanks to advances in dietetic science, the eggplant remains a staple of a global culture of culinary tradition and experimentation. An examination of the early modern connotations of the eggplant, or the ways in which it was visually depicted, can guide us to new understandings of the contested border between art and science as well as the implicit operations of propaganda in the early modern world.
— by Joseph A. Mogavero
[1] Li Wenhua, “Agro-Ecological Farming Systems in China,” in Environment, ed. Jules Pretty (London: SAGE, 2008), 1: 127.
[2] Rachel Laudan. California Studies in Food and Culture, Volume 43 : Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 140-43. Accessed October 26, 2014. ProQuest ebrary.
[3] Ruperto Nola, “Berenjenas a la morisca” in Libro de guisados, trans. Brighid ni Chiarain (Logroño, 1529). De Nola’s Llibre de coch, originally composed in Catalan in 1520,was translated to Castilian around 1529. This text is a translation of the latter.
[4] John Gerarde, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (London: John Norton, 1597), 273-74. In 1633, Thomas Johnson completed a revised and expanded edition of the Herball, which became the most popular herbal of seventeenth-century England.
[5] “Minor Correspondences,” Gentlemen’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle 97, pt. 2 (1827): 290. In this issue, correspondent K. inquired about the French “aubergine” and the method of preparing it. It is possible that the correspondent and many other Englishmen did not initially recognize the popular French food as their own Mad-Apple.
[6] Ruperto Nola, “Berenjenas a la morisca” in Libro de guisados, trans. Brighid ni Chiarain (Logroño, 1529).
[7] George Cawston, The Early Chartered Companies (A.D. 1296-1858) (Clark: The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., 2003), 236.
[8] Robert F. Erickson, “Johann Wilhelm Weinmann: 1683-1741,” Missouri Botanical Garden.
[9] Elizabeth E. Barker, “The Printed Image in the West: Mezzotint,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003, http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/mztn/hd_mztn.htm.
[10] Erna R. Eisendrath, “Portraits of Plants. A Limited Study of the ‘Icones’,” Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 58, no. 4 (1961), 308.
[11] Christoph Jakob Trew, quoted in Erickson.
[12] Leonhart Fuchs, quoted in Eisendrath, 299.
[13] Brent S. Elliot, “Botanical Art in the Age of Linnaeus,” The Linnaean, Special Issue no.8, 97-99.