garden egg

West Africa and across Central and East Africa; Solanum aethiopicum, the African eggplant, domesticated from the wild Solanum anguivi, small, white or green and often bitter

Grown from southern Senegal to Nigeria and on to Angola and Mozambique; brought from the West African coast to London by British traders in the late 1500s as Guinea squash; taken to Brazil centuries ago, probably with the slave trade, under a name from East Africa's ngilo; now grown commercially in Brazil, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia

In Igboland garden egg comes to the gathering with ose oji, the peppered groundnut paste, eaten with it as kola nut is, and the Nigerian Tribune reports that most gatherings, meetings and traditional weddings there are not complete without ose oji with kola nut or garden egg, a practice that signifies unity, peace, sincerity and respect; in the south-west Igbo women hawk the paste in small containers with garden eggs to go with it. Ozoz Sokoh gives its names as anara in Igbo and ìgbá in Yoruba, watches it pushed through the city in wheelbarrows in season and eats it out of hand, with peanut paste spiced with grains of paradise or in abacha, and what draws her is its slight bitterness, since bitter flavours, she writes, play an essential role in African cooking. England met it early: British traders brought the small white fruit from the West African coast in the late 1500s, and by 1587 this Guinea squash was on English tables and called egg-plant, until the larger purple aubergine took the name and the African fruit fell out of Western cooking. This means that the West kept the garden egg's name and lost the vegetable.