A PUNGENT LOVE AFFAIR
The Art of Eating Garlic
Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French... Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good.
ALICE MAY BROCK, baker of hash brownies; owner of Alice’s Restaurant; author of Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook
The night I discovered garlic, my thoughts were on anything but food. I was seventeen, madly in love as only a hormone-fueled teenager can be, with a gorgeous black-haired boy with dimples and white teeth. He’d borrowed his father’s car for an evening drive-about, our euphemistic term for a quick tour of the city’s streets and then a long park somewhere dark. These evenings were relatively innocent compared with what I hear about teenage sex lives today, but they were exciting and risky then, sometimes involving a roving and perhaps overzealous policeman who shone a flashlight into the car window. What if he took the license plate number and called Joe’s father? Or, worse, my mother?
Never mind, the risk was worth it. This particular occasion was a hypnotic spring evening in early June trembling with promise. The soft air smelled deliriously of lilacs and wrapped around us like eiderdown. The sky was streaked with pastel clouds. But June days are long, and it was taking forever for the sun to go down. We’d driven down every street we cared to, and there was still too much daylight for parking.
“Well, how about we go for some spaghetti?” asked Joe, stopping the car in front of a tiny restaurant across from our favorite park. We’d passed it many times but had never gone in. A restaurant wasn’t my idea of a comfortable place to be with a boyfriend, especially a restaurant that served spaghetti. Eating dinner with Joe’s family was a test I’d managed to pass without choking on the roast beef, but I couldn’t imagine slurping up a dish of slippery pasta in front of him. But he flashed his disarming dimply smile, and we got out of the car.
Peering through the small window in the door covered by an iron grille, we glimpsed dark booths and amber lights inside. The wooden door was heavy, and we both had to push hard to open it. We laughed when it gave and we nearly fell over the threshold. I took a deep breath and was stopped mid-inhale by the most gloriously pungent, tastebud-tingling aroma I had ever encountered. I forgot my eating anxieties instantly; even the anticipation of the main intent of the evening vaporized.
Stop and smell the garlic. That’s all you have to do.
WILLIAM SHATNER
THE ROOM emanated a conglomerate of almost visible aromas—tomato, oregano, hot peppers, cheese—bound together with an indescribably rich, deep, almost skunky smell. It was garlic, of course, my first smell of the real thing. It’s unfair to use the word skunky to describe a smell so deep, dark, and delicious, but skunk spray and garlic bulbs do have something in common: sulfur compounds. Once I heard someone describe skunk spray as a combination of rotten eggs, burnt rubber, and garlic, which I guess is fairly accurate, though I fear it casts aspersions on one of my favorite foods.
“Mmmmmm... what do I smell?” I asked the restaurant’s black-vested waiter, a boy not much older than the two of us. He’d met us at the door, bowing slightly and whisking a large red napkin past his body in a theatrical gesture that invited us in.
“My dad’s spaghetti and garlic meatballs,” he said proudly. “The best this side of Sorrento, where we come from.”
He beamed at us as he led the way through the dim, cozy room to a booth. The table was covered with a red-checked cloth, and in the center a Chianti bottle dripped candle wax. Squat shakers of grated cheese and dried hot peppers sat on each side. It was the kind of place I’d consider the ultimate cliché nowadays, but that night it seemed impossibly sophisticated.
“Do you want menus tonight?” the waiter asked, looking a bit anxious. We were the only people in the room.
“Um, okay,” we said in unison. In the chrome and Formica establishments where we usually ordered toasted BLTs, the menu was either tucked behind the quarter-a-song jukebox on the wall or slapped on the table by the waitress. Here our waiter presented two leatherette-bound volumes with a flourish and then hovered over us, making me uncertain. There were too many unfamiliar things to choose from. And were we actually going to eat a meal?
“Any questions about our selections?” he asked, sounding a little rehearsed. “Everything is home cooked, in the Italian way, by my mom and dad. The spaghetti and meatballs are my dad’s specialty, although there are some seafood items you might like, or perhaps some ravioli stuffed with veal?”
“I think I’ll have the spaghetti and meatballs,” I said. I wanted to taste that delicious smell, and I’d never eaten veal or even heard of ravioli.
With our identical orders written carefully on his pad, the waiter retreated to the kitchen and came back with a basket of toasty bread oozing butter and garlic. I bit into a piece, and it was heaven, the aroma at the doorway multiplied a thousand times into a taste that filled my mouth as well as my nostrils. After the first bite I didn’t care about the butter sliding down my chin. I had a second slice, and then a third. When the basket was empty, the waiter looked very pleased and brought us another, followed by big flat bowls of spaghetti glistening with tomato sauce and topped with three meatballs the size of golf balls.
I didn’t think I’d eat the whole thing, but I did, savoring each bite of soft, garlicky meatball and letting the spaghetti and slippery sauce roll around my mouth before I swallowed it. I slurped it, too—we both did, and it was a bonding moment between us, when we both managed to put aside our self-consciousness and simply eat with gusto, no matter what we looked like.
I’d never eaten such a heavenly meal. That evening was the first of many visits to “our” Italian restaurant, and Luca, the waiter, became almost a friend. He always greeted us with a wide smile and a basket of hot garlic bread. I thought he was psychic. How did he know we were coming? Did he have a basket ready every evening at seven in case we dropped by? We ate the same meal every time, too, partly in honor of that first evening, but mainly because we loved it so much. It was our tradition.
I’ve often wondered what became of that restaurant, whose name I can’t remember, and of Luca and his beaming smile. The cozy, welcoming atmosphere and his dad’s Promethean cooking had a big influence on me. It was a very long time ago, but that evening was a turning point in my life. It opened up a new world of taste and provided me with one of the keenest—and the garlickiest—gastronomic experiences of my life.
My eyes grew heavy and I began to sink into an odd, sleepy euphoria. “Ah,” said Robert. “She is feeling the garlic effect.”
RUTH REICHL, Comfort Me with Apples
I DIDN’T realize that Luca and his family were going to have an influence on more than my budding sense of taste. They were a small part of the contingent of thousands of Italians and other Europeans who immigrated to North America—and particularly to Toronto, where I lived—right after the Second World War. They brought garlic with them, but they brought other influences too: they cried and they laughed more and harder than my Anglo-Saxon family did, they had bigger families that interacted more, and they went to church a lot, grew their own vegetables, and made their own sausages and wine. They almost always created their own communities and stayed within them, even though my grandma sniffed that “those new people” didn’t know their place. She meant, of course, that their place was anywhere but our country, but since they were here they’d better learn not to upset the British status quo.
I loved Grandma, but she was a bit of a relic, if not an outright bigot. She was an immigrant herself—she’d come to Canada from Britain as a young mother with Grandpa and my father. Despite her wacky sense of humor and lively nature, she had a disapproving side and stood firmly on guard for staid British ways. Her new country never measured up to her old one, but whenever a few “vulgar foreigners” threatened our conservative British colony, she rose to its defense as if it were Buckingham Palace under attack. Not for anything or anyone would we relinquish our refined ways, especially not for those Johnny-come-latelies who were not original settlers. This was Britain’s country.
Grandma didn’t live to see the changes, but within a generation all of those foreigners—the Italians, the Portuguese, and the Greeks, and later Indians, Poles, Vietnamese, Chinese, and more—had started to reshape life and attitudes in many parts of the continent for the better, bringing an exciting mixture of cultures that has continued in the generations since.
None of this was obvious to me on those adolescent evenings when Joe and I ate spaghetti and meatballs in Luca’s restaurant and gazed hungrily into each other’s eyes. But when we were married and had our own apartment kitchen, I began to practice my newly discovered hobby: cooking. This was a new adventure with unseen boundaries. In the produce department of our local supermarket I found vegetables that Grandma had never seen, “exotic” ones like zucchini and eggplant. Even broccoli, which had been around for a few years but was generally disdained because of its cabbagelike taste, was gaining in popularity. Garlic was significantly absent. It never grew in my father’s vegetable garden so I’d never laid eyes on it and I assumed it grew in the tropics, maybe on a tree. But garlic salt and garlic powder lurked on the spice shelves. I bought some of the powder but wasn’t sure how to use it, so it languished in my kitchen cupboard until it yellowed and hardened and I threw it out, wondering if I was missing something.
Italian eateries were sprouting up all over, and spaghetti became a staple on the tables of Anglo-Saxons like me—spaghetti with meat sauce, not the big, soft meatballs that Luca’s dad made. Even he morphed our favorite dish into spaghetti Bolognese, a North American version of a classic Italian recipe. Every restaurant served it, and every new cook and college student on a budget had his or her own version. The home versions were made with ground beef sautéed and then simmered with copious quantities of canned tomato sauce—and not much garlic or any other herb except for a pinch of dried basil. The authentic Bolognese recipe—named for Bologna, where it originated—is made with pancetta and beef, veal and/or pork (sometimes chopped, not ground), minced onion, carrot, celery, plenty of garlic, red wine, chicken stock, a bit of tomato paste, and a cup or so of milk to smooth and enrich the sauce. It’s thick, more like a meat stew than a tomato sauce, and is usually served with tagliatelle, not spaghetti, although that’s a niggly point. It’s also great with polenta.
I’d never heard of tagliatelle when we went to Luca’s restaurant, and I doubt that it was on the menu. Spaghetti was the pasta of the day, with lasagna a close second, prepared with the ever-present meat sauce layered with lots of mozzarella cheese. I didn’t know that in Italy pasta was often served just with masses of chopped garlic, olive oil, and Parmesan cheese, the best way ever. It and many other variations, including an authentic Bolognese sauce, can be found in North American restaurants today because we’ve learned to love real Italian food and to adore garlic. People like Luca and his family got the changes rolling, and gradually the meat-and-potatoes dinner lost its place at the top of the North American meal plan, which began to include soupçons of garlic.
Unless very sparingly used, the flavour is disagreeable to the English palate.
ISABELLA BEETON, Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861)
BOTH MOM and Grandma, who lived with us, were good cooks, but our meals always followed the meat-and-potatoes plan and seldom had strong flavors—certainly never a hint of garlic. We rubbed thyme and sage on our pork chops, doused them with HP Sauce, and considered ourselves adventurous gourmands. When I look at the label on the bottle of HP Sauce stored in my fridge, I’m surprised to see garlic on the ingredients list. Who knew?
Garlic was never chopped into Grandma’s steak and ale pie, and slivers of garlic were never inserted in Mom’s roast beef. Funny, I’m just one step removed from that English heritage, but I can’t imagine roast beef without a couple of cloves of garlic sliced and embedded in the succulent meat.
Mom and Grandma hadn’t been introduced to the wonderful allure of garlic, but there was more to their avoidance of the odorous bulb than a lack of opportunity. They’d inherited the Anglo-Saxon prejudice against it. Even when I was a little girl I’d often heard Grandma speak disdainfully of “that man across the street, the one with garlic on his breath.” It appeared he was more unworthy than the lurching fellow down the street, whose breath was often rank with beer. Their prejudice wasn’t their fault, I suppose. For long stretches of history, from the Romans to the Renaissance and for most of the twentieth century, Anglo-Saxons scorned garlic as fit only for peasants. Garlic isn’t used much by the Japanese, either, perhaps because Japan is geographically isolated and its food has traditionally been based on local products, yet it’s an essential part of other Asian cuisines—Korean, Thai, Indonesian, and Chinese. Maybe the Japanese are like the English and have an aversion to foods considered attractive to peasant stock.
Long before the Romans invaded Britannia, their soldiers knew that garlic was good for more than keeping muscles strong. It also gave a pot of plain old turnips a boost. The soldiers passed their kitchen tricks along to Celtic cooks—sometimes men, sometimes women, for the Celts had a democratic society in which women were considered equal to men, owned property, chose their own husbands, and led battles, as Queen Boudicca did. And little by little, won over by the growing variety of other vegetables and fruits the invaders brought from their warmer Mediterranean country, the Celts learned to appreciate garlic.
The Romans introduced many foods to Britannia during the nearly four hundred years they occupied the country. They also built roads that lasted for centuries, founded cities like London and Manchester and York, created water and sewage systems, and established linear measurement. You might say they started Britannia on the road to civilization. Their influence continues to this day (in Canada we started to phase out feet and inches in favor of metric measurement a couple of decades ago, but many of us still prefer the Roman way) and this includes their effect on the Celtic diet. The Celts were big on hunks of ox or cow speared right out of the pot with a knife, but the Romans introduced them to chicken; different kinds of game, including brown hare and pheasant; and a delicious escargot (Helix pomatia), called the Roman snail in Britain today. They brought herbs such as parsley, thyme, bay, and basil; fruits such as apples, mulberries, and cherries; and many vegetables, including cabbages, peas, and asparagus. And they brought garlic, as well as leeks, onions, and shallots—all members of the Allium genus. The leek was adopted so wholeheartedly that it later became the national emblem of Wales.
Putting aside the soldiers who stank of garlic, it’s fair to say the Roman generals and bureaucrats were a pretty impressive lot. They were civilized and sophisticated, and they knew how to prepare food and eat it with ceremony. Soon the Celtic elite—for there was an elite in Britanny, made up of chieftains and tribe rulers, not to mention Druid priests—began to suffer from an ancient version of Stockholm syndrome, and within a generation or two they were emulating the ways of their invaders. They invited the Romans to fancy dinner parties, ordering fine foods and wines from around the empire to impress them. The two groups intermarried. The Celts took up the Roman practice of reclining on couches to dine and kept slaves to serve and mop up. One woman in Chester, England, was so won over by the Roman way of dining that she had a likeness of herself lounging in typical Roman fashion in her triclinium carved on her tombstone. Her guests might have been served nettle pie, roast duck in fancy sauces of dried damson plums or other fruits, swan simmered in seawater, and steamed custards of small fish. The upper classes ate dishes flavored with garum, a fermented fish sauce much like the Vietnamese nam pla we use today, and Asian spices such as ginger, pepper, cinnamon, and saffron.
But no garlic.
As far as the Roman aristocracy was concerned, garlic was fine for giving strength to those who needed it or for providing the peasants’ humble food with more flavor, but they didn’t touch the stuff themselves unless it was prescribed by the family physician for a poisonous bite of the shrewmouse or an attack of asthma. Among the upper classes garlic was considered a tonic and a medicine—it was used more than any other herb in the pharmaceuticals of Greek and Roman times.
Meanwhile, by the fifth century the Roman empire had come to its inevitable end and a dark age was casting its gloom over the world. Roman soldiers and their leaders left Britannia, and food became simply a necessity again. Garlic continued to grow around the abandoned garrisons and was harvested by the peasants and farmers descended from the Celts who’d learned its value in a pot of turnips, but in most of the country a bias against garlic as food took hold and lasted for centuries. Come to think of it, it lasted until my grandma’s day.
It was the monks who kept both garlic and all of Europe alive during those impoverished days. The early Middle Ages was a good time to be a monk: at that time monks were probably the most economically advantaged people in the world. Their monasteries were both physical and spiritual sanctuaries, where good food (we can only assume some of it was cooked with garlic) and good health were encouraged. Good health included good medicine, and the monks had the time and the wherewithal to study and make many medicines from plants, including garlic.
OTHER NORTHERN Europeans weren’t quite as snooty about garlic as the English. Poles, Russians, Germans, and Hungarians knew a good thing when they smelled it and adopted garlic as a flavoring, though not as wholeheartedly as people living around the Mediterranean. During the Renaissance, after fourteen-year-old Catherine de’ Medici of Florence married France’s equally young Henry II, in 1533, and brought her own chefs to France with her, the French grew to love garlic also. Those in the northern part of the country, however, always held themselves a little aloof from garlic’s strong flavors and used it only in small quantities. Henry IV, who in 1600 took one of Catherine’s cousins, Marie de’ Medici (who was as influential as Catherine in culinary matters), as his second wife, was a devout garlic lover, maybe because a clove of garlic was rubbed on his lips when he was born to protect him from evil spirits. He regularly ate so much raw garlic it’s said his breath could knock out an ox at ten paces.
With enough garlic, you could eat the New York Times.
MORLEY SAFER
EVENTUALLY I married the beautiful Joe and was embraced by his family. As third-generation descendants of Irish and English immigrants, with a touch of French in the mix that shows up in the surname I still carry, my in-laws were almost as Anglo-Saxon as my family.
My mother-in-law loved to cook almost as much as she loved to say the rosary and go to Mass, though I’m sure cooking two and sometimes three squares a day for seven people was a chore. She was a born cook, and she liked to try new recipes on her gleaming white stove, which I coveted. Instead of a regular cooking element on the rear left, it had a deep well with an extra-low heat setting for simmering stews and soups, something like a built-in slow cooker, a feature I never saw again. It was a good idea that should be resurrected. She used it to make one of her new specialties, “Eyetalian” spaghetti sauce, a version of a recipe she’d picked up from the Italian wife of a local butcher.
One day she taught me how to make it. “Chop the onion small and fry it first,” she instructed, tying the strings of her big apron behind me. “Don’t let it get too brown. Stir it around and let it sauté a bit.”
She had a whole set of wooden spoons I thought were quaint and old-fashioned, though I admitted grudgingly to myself that they stayed cool even if you left them in the pot by mistake. Then she crumbled in the “pound of ground round” she’d bought from the butcher’s wife, specially selected for her from very lean trimmings of bottom round steak. “Never add it in one lump,” she said, “or that’s the way it will stay.” The meat was further broken up with vigorous fork action, which I had to watch before I was allowed to do it.
When the meat was browned and suitably separated, she gave me a big can of stewed tomatoes to open, pour in, and mush around in the pot. Then a can of tomato paste and pinches of dried basil and oregano. I stirred, and the greenish-black bits gave up their fragrance to the bubbling sauce. “And now,” my mother-in-law announced dramatically, “here is the butcher’s wife’s little secret.” And she produced a small cellophane packet of white powder. “Only a tiny bit of this now—we don’t want to make it too strong and smell the house up.”
IT WAS garlic powder. I took a sniff. It reminded me of that wonderful smell in Luca’s restaurant, but not exactly. It was harsher, a bit like tin. The tiny pinch I stirred into the bubbling sauce was quickly swallowed up, and then a fuller, subtler aroma was released. Why hadn’t I opened the package in my kitchen before it crystallized and turned yellow?
The cooking well was covered, the heat turned to the slowest simmer, and the sauce left all afternoon to cook down and thicken up. We consumed it steaming hot, over coils of thick spaghetti, with lashings of grated Parmesan shaken from a supermarket container.
I was grateful for the cooking lesson and took the recipe home in my head. I made it at least twice a month but added my own embellishments, because, like my mother-in-law, I liked to experiment. Over the years I used more and more garlic powder until the sauce did smell up the place, in a good way, of course. Then I introduced chopped celery and green peppers. Once I added pineapple chunks, a hideous mistake. I started adding a pinch of sugar if the tomatoes seemed too tart. A few times I snuck in a dash or three of hot pepper sauce, until the children—for by this time we had four, three eating adult food and one still on canned purées—complained that it was too “’picy.”
My mother-in-law’s sauce, formerly the butcher’s wife’s sauce, had become my sauce, and I took full credit for it if anyone commented favorably on its taste. I’m more honest now and can freely admit my mother-in-law was my inspiration. For years it was my only sauce, but then I learned a new method directly from another Italian woman: Anna, a handsome, big-boned woman who helped me clean the suburban house we’d settled into.
Anna saw me making my sauce one day and stopped to comment, though that was rather difficult since she didn’t speak much English. But she got her point across with a torrent of Italian accompanied by many gestures toward my simmering sauce and a sweeping-away motion toward the opened cans of tomatoes and the bottles of garlic powder and herbs on my counter. “Fresca, fresca,” she said emphatically. Her meaning wasn’t hard to ascertain. Her last gesture was a finger pointing to her chest, followed by a familiar thumb-and-forefinger circle at her mouth and a loud lip-smacking mmm-wah! Her show-and-tell was clearly meant to let me know she made a really, really good tomato sauce, better than I ever could with my bottled herbs and dried garlic and canned tomatoes.
On her next cleaning day Anna brought me a plastic tub of her sauce.
“Mangia, mangia,” she commanded, opening the tub and handing me a spoon. I complied—what else was I to do?—and even though the sauce was cool and not accompanied by a pasta partner, it made me close my eyes with pleasure. I was transported back to Luca’s restaurant and the aroma and flavor of tomatoes melded with cheese and that rich undertone of garlic.
“Mmmm,” I said, opening my eyes. Anna was waiting for my reaction and was clearly pleased. With a dramatic flair she’d obviously been born with, she set a plastic shopping bag on the counter and with a flourish withdrew a huge preserving jar of tomatoes, a wedge of Parmesan, a whole uprooted basil plant, a big yellow onion, and a huge bulb of garlic. Today we were going to cook, not clean.
Anna set to it. With authority she pulled the rolling pin and a big carving knife from a drawer, set the garlic bulb on my wooden breadboard, and with a quick, light whack of the rolling pin separated the bulb into papery cloves. Then she smashed the flat of the knife blade down on each clove, one after the other, instantly releasing that strong and wonderful smell of garlic. The skin was set aside and the smashed cloves were expertly minced, then the onion quickly peeled and chopped fine. Into a saucepan they both went—and I mean the whole bulb of garlic—with a dash of olive oil, to sauté slowly and fill the kitchen with that irresistible aroma of two alliums cooking.
“Mmmmm,” I said again. Anna grinned. She was enjoying this. She pulled my bottle of garlic powder from the spice shelf and tossed it into the garbage. I flinched. “No, no,” she said firmly. “Quello fresco,” she insisted. I had to admit that her fresh garlic smelled better than my dried stuff. The preserving jar was opened and its contents went into the saucepan—a purée of red ripe tomatoes, not stewed or whole. “Io li ho cresciuti e preservati,” she said. What did she mean? I shrugged my shoulders and raised my eyebrows.
Anna made a digging motion and pantomimed putting a plant into the ground and patting the soil around it. “Io li ho piantati e cresciuti da me stesso,” she said, gesturing to my tomato bed at the back of the house. It was her body language that did it. The big jar was filled with tomatoes she had grown, just as I had grown mine, and had preserved herself, as I had not. I pointed to the basil and raised my eyebrows again. Anna nodded. She’d grown the basil herself, too. And the garlic? I pointed at the bits of skin on the cutting board. She nodded again. Even then I was a pretty serious gardener, but, except for the tomatoes in the sunny spot behind the house, I wasn’t interested in growing vegetables or herbs, and I’d never known anyone who grew garlic. But she was Italian, and it was probably a native plant where she came from. Was it difficult to grow? Maybe I could try some myself sometime. But our language differences made it too difficult to ask Anna more, so I filed my thoughts away for the future.
Anna put the lid on the pot, leaving a crack open at one side, turned down the heat, and pointed to her watch. “Now we clean,” she said in English.
About forty-five minutes later Anna gestured to me to return to the kitchen. She grated the cheese and added about a cup to the sauce, along with salt and pepper. She stripped the leaves off the basil plant and handed me a knife. Chopping the basil was to be my contribution. In went the little mound of green, and then Anna stirred the mixture until the cheese melted, turned off the heat, and let the pot sit on the warm element.
“Mangiare domani,” Anna said, tapping the rim of the pot and shaking her head. “Non oggi.” I understood instantly, as one cook to another. Let it sit for a day so that the flavors develop. Eat it tomorrow, not today.
WE DID eat it tomorrow, and we all had Roman-soldier breath the day after that. The sauce was delicious, rich yet light, with an exhilarating, fresh gardeny taste of tomatoes enriched with the deep flavors of the cheese and garlic. The kids gobbled it up. I decided the fresh taste was due as much to the relatively short simmering time as to the homegrown and home-preserved tomatoes it was made with. A rich tomato sauce that’s been cooked down all afternoon has its place all right, such as spread on pizza, dabbed on green beans, or served sparingly with meatballs, but sometimes it can be heavy and tongue-burningly strong. The texture of Anna’s sauce was finer than mine, too, with no lumpy pieces of tomato, because of the puréeing process. Until I eventually bought my own tomato mill, which grinds the raw fruit whole and then discards the skins and seeds—and is made in Italy, I might add—I replicated the texture by puréeing tomatoes in a blender or, once I acquired one, a food processor. But it was all the garlic that was the clincher, and I knew it. That round, full flavor, like the bass in a jazz quartet.
Eat it. Love it. The odds are high that garlic will love you in return. Can you say that about thyme? About sage? About arugula? About your child?
CHESTER AARON, The Great Garlic Book
FOR MANY years Anna’s sauce replaced my mother-in-law’s in its various Canadian-style versions as my new official pasta sauce. I adhered religiously to Anna’s method and never added green peppers, celery, or other exotica. And I never altered its secret ingredients: an entire bulb of garlic—when I could get my hands on the real thing, that is (I’d rescued the bottle of dried stuff Anna unceremoniously threw into the garbage can and used it till it was gone, then bought another one and another one)—and the grated Parmesan, melted right into the mixture. Sometimes, I confess, I was reduced to using the supermarket shaker can. Back in the mid-sixties, it was difficult to buy whole wedges of fresh Parmesan, but as new Canadians kept arriving to lay the bricks or pour the foundations of the new houses in Toronto’s burgeoning subdivisions or to open new restaurants, stores began to stock it. It was expensive—and it still is—but its full, nutty flavor and moist freshness is worth every penny.
As for garlic, it started to show up on some greengrocers’ shelves, but it didn’t look like the one Anna had brought to my kitchen. Hers had almost filled my palm, its shiny skin striped with purple. The all-white store-bought ones were piddlingly small and too often had green shoots in the center and rotten cloves that turned into gray powder inside their papery covering as soon as I tried to pull them off.
But after years of searching for good garlic, I got lucky.
Although we lived in a WASPy subdivision, my kids were bused to the local Catholic school with dozens of Italian and Portuguese children and were invited to lots of rec-room birthday parties. When I’d pick them up after the festivities, I was invariably invited to join the many celebrating aunts, uncles, and cousins for a glass of homemade wine and a slice or two of garlic-infused sausage. I had mixed feelings about these visits—much as I wanted to make friends with the parents of my children’s pals, it was like having a conversation with a dozen Annas at once. It was easier with the men because they had usually learned enough English to communicate, but their wives stayed at home with their large families or, like Anna, helped other people with their cleaning and had less opportunity to learn or speak English.
Nevertheless, I never turned down an invitation, partly out of politeness and partly because I was curious. One evening, after I’d drunk two tumblers of homemade wine and liberally helped myself from a platter heaped with rounds of sausage, shavings of cheese, piles of glossy black olives and marinated artichoke hearts—new to me—and after I’d enthusiastically exclaimed over the little folds of salty pink ham I ate so ravenously, the father of the house asked if I’d like to see the cantina.
A SECOND kitchen in the basement! This was new to me, too, but I decided Anna must have had one as well—maybe all Italians did—for preserving and storing her tomatoes. There was a sink, a stove and big pots, a long counter, a utensil rack, and shelves and shelves of bottled tomatoes, pickles, fruits, and any number of vegetables. It was rather like the root cellar on my other grandma’s farm. Hanging from the rafters were several dark pink hams, which the birthday boy’s dad proudly told me he had prepared himself. “This is my prosciutto.”
“Wow!” I said. “I had no idea you could make ham! I get mine sliced at the supermarket.” Then I caught sight of a dozen or so hanging ropes of garlic.
“Did you grow all that?” I asked.
He laughed. “Yes.” Did he think I was a pampered Canadian idiot who’d drunk too much of his wine? I was feeling a bit like one. He took down a rope and showed me how the bulbs, some pure white and some striped purple, like Anna’s, were twisted together. “You just take the long stalks while they’re still soft and tie them up,” he said. Then he reached for a big knife and with his work-callused hands cut off a big bulb and handed it to me. “Will you take this for your cucina? You like the food so much, maybe you’d like to try it...”
He seemed anxious, as if he feared a gift of garlic was in bad taste, and I fell all over myself trying to tell him about Anna’s garlic and how I’d been trying to find some like it in the stores, with no luck. I burbled on, thanking him profusely and feeling more than a little foolish.
But he must not have thought too badly of me because every few weeks for several months he sent an unblemished globe of garlic to school with his son, Aldo, for my son to pass along to me. I treasured the garlic and used it carefully, saving most of it for Anna’s sauce.
· BARBECUE TIPS FROM THE TWELFTH CENTURY ·
England’s upper class had at least one garlic lover in medieval times: Alexander Neckham, theologian, poet, grammarian, biblical scholar, gourmand, and accomplished cook, born in 1157, on the same night as Richard I. In fact, Alexander shared his mother’s milk with Richard, since his mother was Richard’s wet nurse. Because of his talents as a cook and a storyteller, Alexander was a popular host of dinner parties. He lived for several years in France and could offer cooking advice that would stand up among today’s backyard barbecue chefs.
“A roast of pork is prepared diligently,” he wrote, “[if it is] frequently basted, and laid on the grid just as the hot coals cease to smoke. Let condiments be avoided other than pure salt or a simple garlic sauce. It does not hurt to sprinkle a cut-up capon with pepper. [It will] be quite tender turned on a long spit, but it needs a strong garlic sauce, diluted with wine or verjuice.”
· KEEP YOUR POWDER DRY ·
Garlic powder may not have the lively taste or health benefits of fresh garlic, but it can come in handy as a last-minute flavor fix in the kitchen. To maintain at least some of its goodness, commercially produced garlic powder is cut and dried at about 122°F (50°C) and no higher than 140°F (60°C), then crushed. It’s at least twice as concentrated as fresh garlic, and the taste is a little different because of the sulfur compounds released during the cutting and drying. But the potential for some allicin production remains, and most dried powders contain more of the benefits of fresh garlic than do the blanched or acidified whole cloves sold in packages. Naturally, quality varies among products. Garlic powder has a long shelf life and maintains its qualities for three years or more if it’s kept dry.
· ANNA’S SAUCE ·
Anna didn’t use measurements when she made her ambrosial sauce, but I developed rule-of-thumb instructions so that I could pass a recipe along to people who asked. Instead of tomato purée I often use canned plum tomatoes—a 28-ounce can plus a 19-ounce can—puréed in my food processor. The taste and texture of the sauce varies slightly every time you make it—it depends on the thickness of the purée and the sweetness of the tomatoes.
1 medium onion
1 whole bulb garlic
2 tbsp olive oil
two 25-ounce jars tomato purée, about 6 cups
1 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 cup chopped fresh basil (use 1 tbsp or more to taste of dried basil if fresh is unavailable)
salt and pepper to taste
Peel and chop onion into small dice. Separate the garlic bulb into cloves, peel them, and chop finely. In a large saucepan, heat the oil and sauté onion until it begins to color—don’t brown. Add garlic and sauté just until it’s fragrant.
Add tomato purée and bring to a gentle boil. Turn heat down, cover saucepan with a lid, leaving it partly open, and simmer gently for about 45 minutes, no longer than an hour. Cooking time depends on the thickness of the bottled purée; because they have more liquid, canned tomatoes need about an hour to thicken slightly. Add Parmesan and stir till it melts. Turn off heat and add basil, salt, and pepper. Allow sauce to sit for a day before using it for pasta al pomodoro: boil a pasta of your choice to just short of al dente; drain and return to the pot with a little of the pasta water and a dash of olive oil and a knob of butter. Cook until mixture thickens a bit, then fold in some of the tomato sauce—don’t drown the pasta; the Italians never do! Garnish with lots of grated Parmesan and more chopped basil.
· NO GARLIC FOR FIDO ·
Epicurean cats and dogs may love garlic as much as humans, but don’t let them eat it. Even a bit of garlic in the leftover roast beef can cause hemolytic anemia in a small animal, destroying the red blood cells. The cells become rigid and rupture, then leak hemoglobin into the animal’s urine.