Very suddenly this week and perhaps like many other CSA shareholders, we found ourselves with a glut of eggplant. Armed with a copy of “Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning,” we set out today to do something productive with it.

The result: five beautiful jars of Mediterranean Chutney.

More on that momentarily. But first, a word about eggplant. From The Wikipedia.

• Eggplants are native to India.
• 18th Century imperialists named them eggplants because the cultivars of the day were actually white and yellow and it was an aptronym. These days, of course, British imperialists call them aubergines. It is unclear why American imperialists have not caught on.
• Eggplants are berries. Their seeds, you may have noticed, are quite bitter. That’s because they contain tobacco — Eggplants are close relatives of tobacco plants.
• In fact, if you had 20lbs of eggplant you would have the same amount of nicotine as one cigarette. We have noted this for future preserving projects and/or smoking cessation drug patents.

Mediterranean Chutney is simple and unintimidating: an excellent gateway into preserving.

What you will need:

Tomatoes (we used about 10 San Marzanos purchased from Grateful Farm at the Cambridgeport Farmers’ Market)
An onion or two
An eggplant or three (we used 2 1/2 medium sized)
Three cloves of garlic, at least
A zucchini or two
1 cup of vinegar
1/3 cup of brown sugar
Salt, pepper, red pepper, tarragon, rosemary, oregano, whatever you have on hand
Canning jars and lids

What you do:

Wash and chop the veggies. Put them in a large saucepan with the spices and boil over low heat. When everything is soft and well blended (after about 40 minutes or so) add  the vinegar and brown sugar. You can keep it on the low heat until it looks like jam or until it’s more liquid-y. We gave it another 40 minutes or so, until it was somewhere inbetween.

Wash the jars and lids in boiling water. (We timed  this so they were still warm when we were ready to load them up with chutney.) Leave about a quarter-inch of space at the top of each jar when you’re filling them. Put on the lid and the band — and tighten them. Let them cool on a counter and then store them in the fridge.

The recipe we’re using says the flavor will improve with age, but it doesn’t indicate how long they’ll last. Fingers crossed.

Addendum

We nearly used this eggplant pickling recipe, posted on the interwubs by a Josephine Caravetta. Anyone with that many vowels in their name can surely be trusted and we may call on her next week. Please report back if you are inspired to try it.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 1:10 am and is filed under Preserving+canning. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.