Whether you consider its place in the garden or the kitchen, the eggplant is decorative, flavorful, and inspiring. I can just visualize the eggplant in a wonderful dish of moussaka, and the yellow peppers in a ragout of veal and mushrooms, with a baguette and a glass of good chardonnay—sounds like a tasty dinner! The genus Solanum is believed to contain 1700 species. It is an extremely amazing genus, including everything from the eggplant and potato to the deadly nightshade. Louis XIV introduced the eggplant to northern France, and Thomas Jefferson did the same for the United States. According to Waverly Root, the southern Italians and the Arabs of the Middle East know a lot about cooking eggplants, but, strangely, he doesn’t mention the Greeks. —Henry Evans
112 copies were printed and sell for $300 each.