My Home is the Taste of Eggplant

Growing up in Sri Lanka, my childhood was rich with home cooked eggplant dishes — despite my dad’s warnings

Me and my mother in the late ’90s.

I cannot remember when I first tasted eggplant, but I was at home. Where I grew up. Our house sat in one corner of a two-acre paddy field in the teardrop island, Sri Lanka. I was in kindergarten, or maybe even younger. My mother made sure I grew up with the flavors of wambatu. This is the name for eggplant, aubergine or brinjal in native Sinhalese — wambatu.

In Ayurveda, purple eggplant is considered a “heaty food” — my father, always reading, would advise us against eating it too often. “You’ll get a headache,” he will say one day. “Your legs and hands will ache,” he will tell us another day. Now at 24, I realize my father may have been right all along. Nightshades such as eggplants do seem to trigger my frequent migraines.

But it was too late. I will always love wambatu now.

Growing up in our little home, my mother would cook me her tempered eggplant dish two or three times a week. We had two kitchens at home. One was the usual indoor kitchen. The other was an open kitchen space with an earthen fire. This was the norm in Sri Lankan homes. The modern indoor kitchen is for light cooking. The earthen fire is for “serious”cooking.

Inside, there was a kerosene stove. “It cooks food faster,” my mother would say. She juggled two jobs — teacher and housewife. Once she washed and removed the stems, she would cut each eggplant into thin slices. She would carefully check for any rotten part, or sometimes for worms. If your eggplant has tiny holes inside, it’s a telltale sign of pests. In the early 2000s, most vegetables we bought home were organically grown. There was always a chance to find a tiny worm or a black, rotten part in our eggplants.

“These are the best eggplants,” my mother would say as the younger me watched her with disgust as she removed the inedible parts. “You know you aren’t eating poison. They don’t have chemical pesticides.”

In mornings before school, she would use an aluminum cooking pot. She would pour a little coconut oil. How many spoons? Two or three? There was no measuring scale. “The right amount, so it tastes right,” she…