Black Beauty

Black Beauty produces large, oblong to egg-shaped fruit with glossy, dark purple-to-black skin, typically ranging from four to six and a half inches long and one to three pounds in weight. The fruit is borne well off the ground on medium-sized plants and has an off-white to tan interior beneath skin tender enough to eat without peeling. Its blossoms are lavender and showy enough to be grown among ornamentals, adding a flowering interest not usually associated with the crop.

Since its debut, Black Beauty has been considered the benchmark for large, high-quality eggplant fruit.

Black Beauty is a heavy producer, commonly setting eight to ten fruits per plant and, under strong conditions, as many as twelve, though it needs plenty of heat to perform well. It grows successfully in containers of five gallons or larger, and plants reward warm weather with prolific, well-watered harvests when picked often. Long a fixture of home gardens, it remains the fruit most commonly seen at farmers' markets and produce stands, standing as the classic standard against which other eggplants are measured.

Black Beauty traces to the late 1800s, when the Chinese 'Black Pekin' eggplant was crossed with 'Large Early Purple' to create 'Imperial Black Beauty', the largest eggplant grown at the time. It reached wider cultivation when Burpee introduced it in its 1902 seed annual, hailed then as the first genuinely important new eggplant the company had brought to market in over twenty-six years.