Purple and bulbous with a neat green cap, eggplant is a funny-looking thing. And sometimes when you eat it, it makes your mouth itch.
No wonder people avoided eating it for centuries. It is a member of the nightshade family, and people reasoned that it must be poisonous.
But somewhere, at some time, someone took this bizarrely shaped fruit with the evocative emoji and fried it in a little oil with garlic and probably added a tomato sauce — and a whole new culinary world opened up to glorious exploration.
