Looking at Vegetables Like a Painter
An eggplant, a market table, and what changes when you stand there a beat longer than it takes to pick something up.
An eggplant holds a highlight the way almost nothing else on a market table does. The skin is so dark it reads as black until the light finds it, and then a stripe of pale violet, nearly white, runs the whole length of the curve. Move your head and the stripe moves with you. Painters figured this out a long time ago. I suspect it’s why eggplants keep turning up in still lifes next to the copper pots.
I went to for onions. But I’d spent and I still had the habit of looking at things longer than I needed to, and the table caught me.
Stay past the time it takes to pick something up and the colors stop being the ones on the chalkboard sign. Tomatoes aren’t red. The ripe ones run red at the bottom and orange up at the shoulders, where the stem is, with a green cast in the shadow where one fruit rests on the next. Okra is matte. Light goes into it and stays there, which is a strange thing for a vegetable to do. The greens on the next table were three different greens, and I stood there sorting them. Blue-green on the collards. Yellow-green on the young chard. On the lacinato kale, a green so dark it’s nearly black, like something painted and then left out in the weather.
A painter sets up a still life by choosing. Two or three things, arranged so the light has somewhere to go. The market table does this on its own if you let it. Whoever stacked the eggplants put the unscuffed side up. The peppers were turned so the stems all faced the same way. Somebody made those decisions at six in the morning, in the dark, before the heat, and most of us walk past them on the way to the onions.
A painter would also tell you a shadow has a color. Under the eggplant it was green, borrowed from the kale beside it. I don’t know what to do with that information in a kitchen. I just liked knowing it.
The looking changed what went in the bag. I’d come for onions and left with those and a long thin eggplant, two of the orange-shouldered tomatoes, and a bunch of the black kale, because once I’d seen them I wanted them on a plate together. I don’t shop that way most weeks, and I won’t tell you to. I’ve spent a lot of hours in produce aisles telling people the best vegetable is the one they’ll cook, and I still say it. A list is how dinner happens most nights. “Eggplant” on a list is a purple oval. The eggplant on the table has a highlight.
At home I cooked them more plainly than I would have otherwise. The eggplant went under the broiler in thick rounds, brushed with oil and salted, until the cut sides went from cream to bronze and the skin blistered. The tomatoes got salt and nothing else. The kale went into a hot pan with garlic and came out the same near-black it started, which I counted as a small win. I’d looked at this food for a long time before I cooked it, and I didn’t want to cover up what I’d been looking at.
It was a Saturday and I had time. That’s most of it. The rest is a minute at the table, turning the eggplant toward the light before it goes in the bag. The one you’ve looked at that long is the one that gets cooked. The ones that go soft in the crisper are the ones I grabbed without looking.
