Eggplant divides people because it is barely one ingredient. Raw, it is bitter and astringent; cooked properly it turns tender with a complex flavour. The traditional fix for the bitterness is mechanical rather than culinary: rinse, drain and salt the sliced fruit before cooking. That means an eggplant that has been prepared carelessly and an eggplant that has been prepared well are different foods arriving under the same name. The texture compounds it. Eggplant is spongy and meaty, and it absorbs cooking fats and sauces readily. In a good dish that absorbency carries the flavour of everything around it. In a bad one it delivers a mouthful of oil. There is also an inherited suspicion: eggplant is a nightshade, its flowers and leaves are genuinely poisonous in quantity because of solanine, and the fruit itself was at one time believed to be extremely poisonous. Little of that reputation is deserved, but it has not fully worn off. The result is a food with the largest neutral bloc of any vegetable YouGov tested (25%) and two roughly equal camps either side of it.