eggplant

Solanum melongena, the fresh fruit, goes into one recipe here: Palestinian maqluba. There 500 grams, about two medium eggplants, are sliced into rounds, salted for 15 minutes to draw out water, and patted dry. They are fried in batches in about 2 cm of oil with the cauliflower and potato until deep golden, then layered over the onion and tomato, so that the pot, flipped onto a platter, lands them on top. The recipe's own oil line carries a warning: 150 ml is the share the fried vegetables actually take up, and the pan itself needs far more.

The Journal's note on maqluba puts numbers on that appetite. A 2021 study that cooked eggplant with avocado oil measured fat at 0.02 per cent of the raw flesh, 6.4 per cent after boiling in an oil and water mix, and 37.8 per cent after deep-frying at 180 degrees, more than a third of the finished weight. It credited the pulp's carbohydrate structure, so oil-loving that the pulp has been studied as a natural emulsifier. A second study found uncoated fried rings reaching 63 per cent oil under some conditions, and cut that by about half with a gel coating. Salting slices to limit oil has no eggplant study behind it, the note says, so it gives no figure. The earliest description it found, Elihu Grant's of 1921, already has the rice, eggplant, deep dish and flip.