English: Eggplant
Tagalog: talong
Talong or eggplant is cultivated throughout the Philippines for the edible fruit; the elongated variety, the most cultivated. Fruit is an excellent vegetable and popular in the rural day-to-day cuisine. It is eaten before it ripens, preferred before the seed hardens. It is a good source of vitamins A, B, and C and also of calcium, phosphorus, and iron; carbohydrates and fiber
Medicinal use:
- Leaves are used for piles.
- The boiled root of the wild plant, mixed with sour milk and grain porridge, has been used for the treatment of syphilis.
- Long fruit is phlegmatic and generative of phthisis, coughs, and anorexia.
- Decoction of roots, dried stalk, and leaves is used for washing sores, exudative surfaces and used as astringent for hemorrhage from the bladder and other hemorrhagic fluxes.
- The juice of leaves used for throat and stomach troubles.
- Decoction of roots taken internally for asthma and as a general stimulant.
- Juice of the fruit, sometimes with pounded leaves, rubbed on suspected syphilitic eruptions of the hands.
- Fruit considered cooling, and bruised with vinegar
- Chinese and Annamites used the roots for skin diseases.
- In Taiwan folk medicine, roots are used for rheumatism, inflammation and foot pain.
- The peduncle, incinerated, used in intestinal hemorrhages, piles, and toothache.
- Seeds used as stimulant but may cause dyspepsia and constipation
- In French Guinea, decoction or infusion of leaves is used for stomach troubles and sore throat.
- In India, juice of various plant parts and pulp of fruits of S. melongena and its wild allies used for various ailments: diabetes, otitis, toothaches, cholera, bronchitis, asthma, dysuria, among many others.
- The fruit is considered cooling, and bruised with vinegar, is used as a poultice for abscesses and cracked nipples.