T
he eggplant is a fruit not a vegetable.
Botanically speaking a fruit is the ripened ovary–including the seeds–of a flowering plant. That means that many foods called vegetables when cooking are actually fruits. That list would include squash, pumpkin, cucumber, sweet pepper, tomato and eggplant.
Does that make ratatouille technically a kind of fruit sald? No, because culinary speaking, a fruit is usually any sweet tasting plant with seeds. (Did you just flash on the sweet tasting rhubarb? There are exceptions to every rule, aren’t there.)
A one-pound fresh eggplant contains 117 calories–about 76 when cooked, 1 gram of fat, 28 carbohydrates, 992 mg of potassium, and 387 international units of Vitamin A.
