Long winter calls for a little Black Magic

It isn’t their season yet, but who cares. I just bought a fantastic, dark purple eggplant at Sharon Farm Market and found it,when cooked, to be sweet, delicious and sort of exotic at an otherwise gloomy time of year.If you feel strongly about eating only local produce, in season, you’ll have to wait until the end of summer to get one of your own (assuming that summer ever comes; at this point, doesn’t it feel as though it won’t?). But eggplant is one of the rare fruits (yep, fruit; the seeds are inside) where there might be some benefit to buying the supermarket variety. The most common eggplant sold in America is a variety known as Black Magic. A study done a few years ago by the U.S. Agricultural Service in Beltsville, Md., showed that these particular eggplants have three times as many cancer-fighting phenolic compounds as other types do. And the particular phenolic compound found in abundance in eggplant is one known as chlorogenic acid, which is believed to be a particularly effective warrior in the fight against cancer-causing free radicals. As is so often the case in life, when it comes to eggplant you have to take the bitter with the sweet, since it’s the chlorogenic acid that causes eggplant to sometimes be bitter. Now, on this topic there seem to be two different schools of thought. One group says that the Black Magic eggplants have a lot of these bitter cancer-fighters; another points out that eggplants today are substantially less bitter than they were 10 or 20 years ago. Who’s right? Who knows. All I can say, anecdotally, is that the eggplant I cooked tonight wasn’t bitter at all and I didn’t salt the slices before I popped them in the oven. Perhaps it was the way I cooked them. Try for yourself and see. This isn’t really a recipe so much as a technique (in other words, I don’t have any exact measurements to offer; you’ll have to experiment a little): Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Cut the top and bottom off a large (washed) eggplant. Cut it in half, lengthwise, and then cut each half into quarters, again, lengthwise (they’ll be slightly wedge shaped, probably). Put parchment paper on a large cookie sheet (or grease the cookie sheet). Put the eggplant slices on the cookie sheet, skin side down. In a small bowl, combine olive oil, lemon juice and coarse salt and freshly ground pepper and then brush the mixture over the eggplant. Roast for about 20 minutes, until the slices are tender and brown. Remove from the oven and let them cool for a few minutes. Cut each wedge into three pieces and toss in a serving bowl with some fresh herbs, such as mint, dill or parsley and chopped scallions or shallots.