Found Poem: Eggplants

(all text from Russ Parsons, How To Pick A Peach)

An eggplant is a thing of rare beauty.
Its form ranges from as blocky and solid
as a Botero sculpture
to as sinuous and flowing as
a Modigliani. Its color
can be the violet of a particularly magnificent sunrise
or as black as a starless night. It can be alabaster white
or even red-orange and ruffled.

And its beauty is more than skin-deep.
The flesh is at once luxurious in texture and
accomodating in flavor.

So why does the eggplant scare people?

Let's get one thing straight:
most eggplants are not bitter
(even though they have every right to be
after everything that has been said about them.)
At least they are no more bitter
than a green bell pepper or the tannic skin of a fresh walnut.
They have a whisper of bitterness
that adds to the taste rather than ruining it. In fact,
it's that subtle edge that makes eggplant
such a great companion.

For a vegetable that can look like such a brute, eggplant
is surprisingly fragile. It bruises easily, and
those bruises quickly turn bad.
Eggplants' thin skin is also susceptible to damage.

Salting the vegetable does nothing to remove bitterness
(which isn't really there in the first place)
but it does pull the water out of the eggplant,
collapsing the cells.
Try it and you'll see.
Salt eggplant only if you are going to fry it in oil.
Supposedly, if you cook eggplant
longer, it will release the oil it has absorbed.
This takes very slow, patient cooking, however,
over a long period of time.