CELEBRATING GARLIC
Two Festivals and a Universal Passion for Garlic
The air of Provence is impregnated with the aroma of garlic, which makes it very healthful to breathe.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
For a couple of years I haunted nearby garlic fairs, sitting on hard benches in tents to hear lectures on the history, folklore, and medicinal value of garlic, jotting down growing and harvesting advice, watching cooking and braiding demonstrations, lunching on garlic sausage and garlic burgers, and sampling exotica like garlic fudge. I brought home jars of pickled garlic and garlic chutney and luscious garlic cultivars to eat and plant.
But I wanted more. The local fairs I was going to were all starting to look the same. I wanted to go to some really big ones, like the monster three-day bash held in Gilroy, California, at the end of July. I wanted to see what other countries’ festivals had to offer. And I wanted to find a certain pink garlic I’d been reading about, Ail Rose de Lautrec, reputedly a gently pleasing variety with amazing storage qualities and satiny pink skin.
To add to the allure of its taste, Lautrec pink garlic has a romantic past. It first appeared in the French village in the mid-Pyrenees in the Middle Ages, when a mysterious traveler who didn’t have enough francs to pay for his lodging offered the innkeeper a few bulbs of a lovely rose-pink garlic instead. The innkeeper planted it, and news of the garlic’s superior taste and keeping qualities spread, though for hundreds of years it was grown only in small quantities in the kitchen gardens of the village. Today it’s grown around the village under the strictest of regulations, using selected growers who have to follow the rules or else, and the village holds a garlic fair the first Friday of every August to celebrate it. But no one at any of the garlic fairs I attended had ever heard of it. I’d have to go to France to find it, and as a garlic-growing convert I was prepared to make the sacrifice.
So during a lull in the conversation at a family dinner one night, I announced to the group at large that I’d be going to the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California at the end of July and the Fête de l’Ail Rose in France in early August, and that the no-expenses-paid position of traveling companion for both these occasions was up for grabs.
There was a short pause and then my daughter, Suzy, put up her hand.
“I’ll take Gilroy,” she said. “It sounds like a blast.”
I kept the bidding open, but no one else volunteered that evening. After only a minimum of arm-twisting, Chris later agreed to accompany me to France. Two trips to destinations thousands of miles apart in the space of ten days—it was an ambitious project, I realized. But it didn’t take me long to realize I was doing more than gathering facts about garlic. I was learning how universal is the passion for this ancient vegetable and how differently people celebrate it.
There is no such thing as a little garlic.
ARTHUR BAER
“DO I smell garlic? Or am I imagining things just because we’re in Gilroy?” asks Suzy, rolling down the car window and sniffing the air. We’ve just come off Highway 101 and are cruising into town, heading for our bed-and-breakfast before taking in the first day of the Gilroy Garlic Festival, the biggest one in the world.
“You’re not imagining it—I smell it too,” I say, drawing a deep, delicious breath. The mouthwatering aroma is all around us, as if some chef in the sky is cooking up a giant casserole of chicken with forty thousand cloves of garlic. But where is it coming from?
Gilroy’s streets are lined with pretty, low-slung houses with lush-looking gardens, but as far as I can see there isn’t a garlic plant in any of them. There’s plenty in the fields outside town, regiments of them growing in endless rows, but garlic plants with their feet still in the earth don’t give off a brain-blowing aroma like this. It seems a fitting introduction to a weekend of garlic overload.
Gilroy is an old town, incorporated in 1870, and now a pleasant, middle-class city half an hour inland from the Pacific Ocean and about a ninety-minute drive south of San Francisco. It has a well-dressed, conservative American look that seems at odds with the pervasive perfume of garlic, and right now it’s almost deserted.
“Maybe everyone’s at the festival,” Suzy says. We follow a few people with folding chairs and sun hats to Christmas Hill Park, where the three-day festival has just got started. Gilroy boldly advertises itself as the garlic capital of the world, though this isn’t technically true; Gilroy Foods (the source of that tantalizing smell, it turns out) may be the biggest processor of garlic in the world—pickled, minced, roasted, granulated, powdered, and more—but the United States ranks only sixth in the production of fresh garlic, behind China, India, South Korea, Egypt, and Russia. Still, garlic is the city’s lifeblood, and the festival has put Gilroy (population 52,027 at last count) on the map. It’s been run with good old American know-how since 1979, with mainly volunteer help—a thousand people the first year and about four thousand each year since—and almost everyone in town has volunteered at some point. The first year the organizing committee hoped to attract five thousand people, and three times that many showed up. They ran out of food and had to send out for shrimp and calamari, butter and bread to feed the hordes. (They had plenty of garlic.)
NO ONE expected such success—least of all the mayor at the time. Before the first festival the organizing committee enthusiastically approached him to ask for city sponsorship, and he said no, a garlic festival was a bizarre idea and the city wouldn’t think of supporting it. So the committee went ahead on its own. The mayor refused to attend the festival. Every year since then about a hundred thousand people—twice the population of Gilroy—have shown up the last weekend in July to eat, drink, dance, and celebrate garlic.
By the time Suzy and I get to the parking lot, a carnival atmosphere has appeared from nowhere. We hear the noise: a brass band here, a thrumming bass over there, people shouting, laughter. We see the peaks of tents and towering red flames shooting into the air. Within minutes we’re caught up in the throng—seniors, moms and dads with kids in strollers, couples holding hands, teenagers running and pushing their way to one of the bands playing on three open-air stages. The crowds sweep us along to Gourmet Alley, the food stalls and cooking area that are the heart of the festival.
And they say Friday, today, is the festival’s least busy day.
This time we see as well as smell lots of garlic, bowls of it chopped and waiting to be stirred into the huge pans and cauldrons sitting over open flames on long gas barbecue racks. The crowd pushes up against the metal barrier to watch the Pyro Chefs, two festival regulars, put on their show. With theatrical flourish they shake giant pans filled with hundreds of shrimp and calamari. Flames lick the sides of the pans, moving higher and higher. There’s a hush—the crowd knows what’s coming—the chefs tip the pans ever so slightly, and whoosh! Bright orange flames leap into the air and billow dangerously near the tented roof. “Woooo,” gasps the crowd, pulling back from the barrier. This is showbiz.
“Wow,” says Suzy. “Now I know why those guys are wearing dark glasses—they’d have no eyelashes without them.”
What garlic is to food, insanity is to art.
AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS
THE BARBECUES were lit a couple of hours earlier in a ceremony befitting the Olympics. From a giant flaming garlic bulb in the center of the park, a bamboo garden torch was lit by the festival president and passed to various important dignitaries, then to Miss Gilroy Garlic Festival, who carried it to Mr. Garlic, a beautifully whiskered gentleman wearing the kind of getup even the most loving grandfather wouldn’t be caught dead in on Halloween: a pouffy white garlic-shaped dress that bared his hairy white shoulders and legs, and a wide-brimmed garlic-laden straw hat. Mr. Garlic held the torch aloft for all to see as he proudly carried it to Gourmet Alley and ceremoniously lit the barbecues, to much applause.
The smell of garlic and onions, browning steak, and roasting peppers is making Suzy and me crazy, so we join the lineup for a combination plate, which seems like a good way to sample the variety Gourmet Alley offers. Our plastic plates are piled high, and not with mere samples. Mine holds a fat garlic sausage with grilled sweet peppers on a bun, a big ladle of small shrimp swimming in sauce, some chicken stir-fry, a big hunk of oozing garlic bread. Suzy’s has a generous helping of calamari, a pile of pasta con pesto, half a pepper-steak sandwich, and the garlic bread. We eat perched uncomfortably on a bale of hay vacated by a couple of women who’ve just cleaned their plates; they wave us over when they see us holding our plates aloft and peering around hopefully.
As Grandma used to say, our eyes are bigger than our stomachs. It’s too much food and too much garlic, even for garlic lovers, and except for the delicious, juicy sausage, the food is a tad overcooked—a problem with mass production, I know. But like those garlic-eating ancient Roman soldiers, we’re well fortified for the afternoon’s foray. We walk out onto the grounds, ready for whatever awaits us.
The grounds are anthills of activity, tents and booths as far as my squinting eyes can see. People from almost every community between San Francisco and San Diego are here, plus more from Denver and Detroit, Orlando and Austin, and Liverpool, England, and Toronto, Canada, buying T-shirts, posters, garlic graters, leather handbags, cookbooks, historic framed photos of old America, jewelry and wineglasses etched with “Gilroy Garlic Festival 2010.” The food vendors set up around the periphery sell more garlic-laden dishes: beef teriyaki, blackened shrimp with rice, BBQ ribs, Cajun crawdads, and garlic-fried green tomatoes. We needn’t worry where to find a bite to eat over the next couple of days.
Suzy heads for the big Garlic Mercantile tent for a look at its wares, and I move through the crowds and in and out of booths selling sterling silver toe rings, nifty aprons with appliqués of cupcakes on the bib, leather sandals, pottery and more pottery, gemstones, bath products, woodcrafts, and decorative pieces in blown glass, and past the beer tent, the rain room (a tent whose walls somehow emit a fine, cooling mist of water), and a rock-climbing wall.
But where’s the garlic?
In the nick of time the Garlic Information Center appears. A nice young woman behind the counter tells me there are no talks or seminars but there is a garlic-braiding class and a garlic-topping contest. Unfortunately, I’ve just missed both for the day. However, if I’d like one, I could have a free garlic-growing kit...
“Or,” she points across the field, “you could head on over to the Christopher Ranch booth. They have lots of garlic for sale.”
At the booth I ask what varieties they have, and does one of them happen to be a French pink garlic? “Never heard of pink garlic,” says the young man. “I’ve seen purple-skinned and purple-striped, even brownish garlic, but not pink. This nice big white one here is the only one we have. It’s what we grow at Christopher Ranch.” He points to a bin of pearly white bulbs with many cloves bulging under their glistening, pristine skin. Every year Christopher Ranch, the largest grower of garlic in North America and the pride of Gilroy, donates hundreds of pounds of the Artichoke cultivar ‘California Early’ to be cooked at Gourmet Alley and in the festival’s demonstrations and competitions. It’s being sold as single bulbs, in bags, or in braids. ‘California Early’ and ‘California Late,’ which isn’t ready for market yet, are the mainstay of the California garlic industry, with ‘Early’ most often used for processing. I buy two huge bulbs for a start.
The afternoon wears on. The sun beats down, and suddenly I’m depleted, my throat dry. Where is Suzy? Samples of garlic ice cream, courtesy of Gilroy Foods, are available at a small booth not too far from the crowded beer garden, but the lineup snakes halfway across the field. Maybe tomorrow. My feet hurt. I wander more, find a big booth selling plastic cups of creamy frozen lemonade, buy one, and sink gratefully onto another straw bale in a cooling grove of redwood trees. This bale is offered by a young man who jumps to his feet as I draw near and says, “Ma’am? Sit here.” Man, was I looking that bad? I can’t swallow the frozen lemonade and have to let it melt in my mouth and slide down my throat.
Fate intervenes with a sign. I glance up and see it straight ahead of me: “Cook-Off Stage.” I know in an instant that is where I should be.
And that’s where I happily spend the rest of the weekend.
After you eat a lot of garlic you just kind of feel like you are floating, you feel ultra-confident, you feel capable of going out and whipping your weight in wildcats.
MICHAEL GOODWIN, food and film writer, in Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers
THE COOK-OFF Stage is where it’s happening, for this festival is really all about food, food with lots of garlic. All around me a happy throng of food lovers watch the chopping and sautéing taking place on the vast stage in event after event. My eyes are glued to the goings-on too. A handful of luxe-looking cooking stations with ovens, gas cooktops, and sinks with hot water are set up for the chefs, professional and amateur, who are taking part. A table on one side of the stage, where the judges taste and exclaim—usually into a microphone—is nicely set with good china.
Volunteer cooking assistants mill about. TV crews carefully pick their way through the proceedings, filming the sweating chefs in close-up and medium frame, while their assistants carefully keep the cables out of the way. Close-ups are displayed on two immense screens on either side of the stage, food porn for us to slaver over. A sunscreen over the stage and the bleachers keeps the rest of us cool and comfortable—and cuts glare for the TV cameras.
It’s Food Network outdoors, live, with no commercials. The shows go on all day without a break. Everyone is having fun—the important thing at the Gilroy Garlic Festival—and I am too.
From the beginning, the festival has had a sixth sense for publicity. In 1979 the first festival played a role in Les Blank’s garlic-giddy documentary Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers. It features one of the three founders, Val Filice, who died in 2007. A second founder, Rudy Melone, died in 1998. The third founder, Don Christopher, happens to sit down beside me in the front row of the bleachers as I’m settling in for the rest of the afternoon.
“Aren’t you Don Christopher?” I ask. “I saw your picture on the program—you’re just the fellow I’d like to talk to.” He looks at me a little like I’m a door-to-door salesman who’s just shown up at dinnertime, but he agrees to chat a while. “Val had a personality and presence like no one else,” he says. “He got the cooperation of everyone.” Don credits Rudy with coming up with the idea for the festival. Rudy was convinced Gilroy was the true garlic capital of the world in spite of a claim made by Arleux, France, which was drawing seventy thousand people to its annual festival in the 1970s. All Gilroy had to do was have a bigger festival to prove it, Rudy said, and it’s been doing that every year since.
As for himself, Don says he’s just a farmer at heart, born on a prune farm near Gilroy with a love of the earth in his genes. But he grew up with a strong entrepreneurial streak. As a lad of twenty-two he bought land and started Christopher Ranch to grow garlic. One might say that organizing a garlic festival with his buddies once he got established didn’t hurt his business, but both Christopher Ranch and the festival have done a lot for Gilroy.
Christopher Ranch harvests 65 million pounds (30 million kilos) of garlic a year in eight fields around Gilroy as well as on leased land in Monterey County and the San Joaquin Valley. “We supply California garlic to the whole country, including parts of Canada, every day of the year,” Don says. “We even borrowed something from the apple guys: we built special cold-storage facilities where we take all the oxygen out and put the garlic to sleep till we need it.”
Don looks more than a little grim when I mention Chinese garlic. “A few years ago China brought garlic into the United States below cost and took over a whole lot of the market,” he says. “In fact, it took over nearly the whole world, including Canada. We had to cut our acreage down to about 55 percent.” But then the flow started to slow down. With next to no money coming into their pockets, Don says, Chinese farmers got wise and quit growing garlic in favor of other vegetables. “We didn’t know that had happened till suddenly the Chinese price went up to nearly match ours.”
But Don hadn’t let the opportunities of cheap Chinese garlic slip through his fingers. “I bought a lot of it and sold it at a profit,” he says.
“You did? No kidding,” I respond. Now there’s bold entrepreneurial spirit.
“Yes, I did. And we sold it rapidly. Everyone was going crazy about the situation, but I figured if I could make a little money on it while others wept, why not?”
“You didn’t sell it as your own garlic, did you?” I ask, a little worried about Don’s scruples.
“I wouldn’t do that!” He looks surprised that I would even suggest such a thing. “We wouldn’t compete with ourselves. We often buy and sell garlic from other countries if we think we’re going to be short or if we have too much. We sold it as Chinese garlic to people who were already buying Chinese garlic. So I made money on it, and I had a lot of fun, too.”
Don isn’t exactly a garlic lover himself. He eats it maybe three times a week, slivered and inserted into the meat he barbecues. “I prefer to grow it,” he says. “I love seeing those green tips coming up in spring when everything else is going into the ground. But what I like the best is marketing it. It’s exciting. I like dealing with buyers and agreeing on a price, I like packing it and shipping it. And I like developing products, like the green garlic we package for garnish and the like. You harvest it when it’s eight to twelve weeks along. Its stalks are tender and mild...”
He looks over my shoulder and waves at his little granddaughter. “She’s looking for me,” he says. He’s had enough chat and is clearly itching to get moving. That’s okay—I’ve had a revealing glimpse of some of the energy that’s made the Gilroy Garlic Festival so successful all these years.
The growing and processing of garlic will move to China. There’s nothing to stop it.
CAO MENGHUI, Jinan Yipin Corp. Ltd., garlic producer and exporter, Shandong, China
NEARLY THE whole world, not just Don Christopher, is angry about Chinese garlic and the way it’s been marketed and exported—or dumped, to be blunt. And some countries aren’t going to take it anymore. They’ve been fighting back with huge tariffs or fines, plus jail sentences for garlic smuggling. Yes, cheap Chinese garlic is such a prized commodity in some places that it’s smuggled across borders disguised as onions or other produce. But the big issue in North America over the past decade has been dumping, and it’s forced many garlic growers to reduce production, like Don Christopher, or to go out of business entirely.
In the United States, the first wave of Chinese garlic appeared in the mid-1990s, at half the cost of California garlic. The Chinese were found to be selling it at less than their cost—which, given their workers’ subsistence wages plus the inexpensive containers used to ship goods, is ridiculously low to begin with. The United States levied a hefty 377 percent tariff on the garlic, the highest imposed on any product crossing its borders. It slowed down imports for a few years, but the Chinese claimed they weren’t dumping and filed for a review of the charges, leading to a lengthy hearing.
Then a loophole in the regulations was discovered, and Chinese garlic began to make its way back into California and other American ports. Imports increased tenfold in three years in the mid-2000s, to 86 million pounds (39 million kilos) by 2005, 5 million pounds (2.3 million kilos) more garlic than was grown in California and up from a meager 365,000 pounds (166,000 kilos) in 2000. The industry was shrinking in California: from 1999 to 2004, the number of acres devoted to growing garlic dropped from 40,000 to 26,000 (from 16,000 to 10,000 hectares), and some growers said they were making no profit at all.
Lawyers for the American garlic industry defending the tariff argued that the Chinese wanted to corner the U.S. market, and the Chinese were accused of using fraudulent schemes to avoid paying customs duties, such as shipping through countries like Vietnam and Japan and falsifying the true country of origin. “The system is not set up to deal with the degree of creativity the Chinese bring to the market,” one lawyer for the California producers told a reporter for SFGate.com.
In Canada, the situation was, and is, similar. “In 2001, China began dumping garlic on the Ontario market for about 40 cents a pound [88 cents a kilo] wholesale. A grower here needed $1.50 to make it viable,” says Mark Wales, president of the Garlic Growers Association of Ontario. “I call that predatory dumping.” He, too, thinks the Chinese want to take over the garlic industry.
Canadian garlic had its start as an industry in the late 1980s, when farmers planted garlic and ginseng as alternatives to the once-lucrative tobacco crops. It takes a few years to establish a good supply of garlic because it’s grown not from seed, as are other vegetables, but from the six to twelve cloves each plant produces, resulting in six to twelve plants—a lot less than the hundreds of plants possible from the seeds of a beet or a carrot. It takes years for a garlic crop to become large enough to supply the market. By 2000, 3,500 to 4,000 acres (1,400 to 1,600 hectares) of garlic were being grown commercially in Ontario (which grows 95 percent of Canada’s garlic). Then the Chinese invaded. Canadian garlic wasn’t worth the cost of harvesting.
“The crop size dropped to about 400 acres in one season,” Mark says. Within two years it was down to 200, or about 80 hectares. “Our association was successful in getting a five-year tariff of about 80 cents a pound [$1.75 a kilo] levied on the garlic. That brought the Chinese wholesale price up to about $1.25, the same as garlic from Mexico. There was no garlic from China anymore, but all of a sudden 11 million kilos”—24 million pounds—“the same as had come from China, was coming in from Pakistan and the Philippines, countries that had never shipped garlic to Canada before.” Although the invoices said the products were from those countries, in many cases the original labels were still on the box: “Product of China.”
The tariff expired in 2007, and it wasn’t renewed, at least in part because the garlic growers felt the government hadn’t been vigilant in enforcing the rules when it was obvious that the Pakistani and Filipino garlic originated in China. The shame of it is that domestic garlic was on the brink of commercial success in 2001. Warren Ham, director of anti-dumping for the Garlic Growers Association of Ontario and a grower himself, says the industry was robust enough to supply all the garlic the market needed; it might even have built a climate-controlled warehouse, like the one at Christopher Ranch, so that supplies could be available nearly year-round.
“But it’s not as if we can’t get back there again,” he says. “We have a choice: we could put our garlic back in the ground and wrap up production for five years down the road till we can supply bigger crops.” Or garlic could continue to be what it’s become: a cottage industry, marketed at fairs and farmers’ markets and via mail order. But if growers decide to invest in the future by propagating their crops of garlic for a few years, they need to find another way to earn enough income to support their families in the meantime.
Like most consumers, I had little idea of the effect Chinese garlic had had on growers; I was more consumed by the effect it had on me. How many times have I exchanged complaints with fellow shoppers over bins of those Asian bulbs, deploring the small size that makes the tiny inner cloves hardly worth the effort it takes to peel them, or the little green shoots that mean the garlic is past its prime, or the squishy feeling under the papery skin that means it’s advanced to the point of death? But the garlic effect goes further than the grocery store and mild complaints between shoppers, and it’s arguably bigger than the problems American and Canadian growers are experiencing. It’s also started trade wars and has caused political conflict in other countries.
In Thailand in 2008 the price of garlic dropped from 40 baht to about 17 baht per kilo (from 60 cents to 25 cents per pound)—less than it cost to grow it—and created hardship for many less-than-affluent growers. The culprit was Chinese garlic, huge amounts of which were allowed into the country under a trade agreement. The government’s solution was to encourage the cultivation of potatoes, which were relatively inexpensive to grow. But where were they to be sold? Potatoes aren’t a big part of the Thai diet, and what market there was demanded only perfectly uniform potatoes in pristine condition.
Farmers protested. Garlic became part of an overall political issue as garlic growers joined truck drivers, rice farmers, and fishermen, all wanting assistance in fighting inflation. Samak Sundaravej, who was prime minister of Thailand for a few months in 2008 and considered himself a gourmand (he was known for his pork marinated in Coca-Cola), tried to alleviate the garlic situation. In one of his Sunday addresses to the country he praised the virtues of the beautifully flavorful and much stronger Thai garlic and urged citizens to use it. But the prime minister spoke out of both sides of his mouth. At about the same time an existing highway through Laos from Kunming, China, to Bangkok was being refurbished to cut the driving time of trucks bringing garlic and other fruits and vegetables from China to Thailand.
In Korea, a trade war over garlic erupted in 2000. Koreans were angry about cheap Chinese garlic, so a 315 percent tariff was slapped on it. China thought that was unfair, so it declared a ban on Korea’s mobile phones and polyethylene products. The dispute seems one-sided, however, since Korea’s banned products amounted to about US$413 million, whereas the garlic from China was worth about US$15 million.
Does anyone like Chinese garlic?
Well, smugglers do. It’s cheap, and if you can find a way to avoid the customs duties levied by many countries, you might make a fortune. Then again, you might get caught.
The Calcutta Telegraph reported that in late January 2011, in a midnight operation, more than 11,000 pounds (5,000 kilos) of Chinese garlic were seized in and around the railway station in Raxaul, India. It had been brought over the border by women and children, presumably because they would arouse less suspicion than a group of men. The previous December, nearly one hundred sacks were seized in the same place. The garlic came from Nepal, where it costs half what it does in India.
In Poland in January 2011, European Union customs police seized six shipping containers containing garlic disguised as onions, which are taxed at a lower rate. The garlic had come from China via Rotterdam and wasn’t the first shipment to be caught.
In 2009, a similar quantity of Chinese garlic had been smuggled into the European Union via Norway, which exempts garlic from customs duties, by an international group of smugglers. The garlic was worth an estimated €1.5 million in customs duties to the European countries it was surreptitiously headed for. The smuggling had gone on for some time, apparently, and the European Anti-Fraud Office launched an investigation in May 2010. A month later a truck carrying a full load of garlic was stopped.
But let’s be honest here. The smugglers aren’t the only ones who like Chinese garlic. North American grocery chains like it, too, even if most of their customers don’t. But who can blame them? Chinese garlic is cheap, plentiful, and always available. Of course it’s plentiful—China grows 75 percent of the world’s garlic.
THE PROBLEM for small growers—and few garlic-growing operations on this continent are big—is that they can’t guarantee a large supply of garlic year-round, which is what big chains want. They may not even be able to supply a large enough amount from August to December, when garlic is in season, having been harvested in late July or August and stored under the usual conditions until winter. That’s where a climate-controlled storage building would be valuable. But first, as Warren Ham says, growers—in Ontario especially, where most of Canada’s garlic is grown—have to get back to where they were in 2001 and produce enough garlic to satisfy the demands of the big chains.
One wonders why the big chains can’t buy small quantities of produce like garlic and tomatoes from local producers instead of bombarding us with imports in our bountiful harvest season. So I was heartened to see Galen Weston, executive chairman of Loblaw Companies Limited (which owns just over a thousand stores and franchises across Canada, including the namesake stores, No Frills, Superstore, Fortinos, Zehrs, and more), advertising the company’s initiative to buy local wherever possible. Would that include garlic? I wondered. How lovely if we could find some really good local bulbs in the grocery bins, maybe an ‘Ontario Giant,’ a Rocambole, or the popular ‘Music,’ a Porcelain brought to Ontario from Italy in the 1980s. So I called head office and asked to speak to the VP of produce procurement about his garlic plans and his take on the Chinese garlic situation. I didn’t get past the public relations department, which intervened and asked me to submit a list of questions. After a few days, I got the following reply: “Upon further review, we believe this is an industry related subject and feel you would be better suited following up with the Retail Council of Canada.”
China doesn’t even grow the many varieties now available in most of the rest of the world. “We have two kinds—softneck and hardneck,” says John Huang, North American representative for Pretty Garlic, one of the biggest importers of Asian garlic to this continent. “We don’t use the other classifications other countries do. Softneck is what we sell, in pure white and regular white, which has a bit of a purple stripe on the skin.”
As Don Christopher and others have said, there was a period when the supply of garlic dwindled in China and the price went up. In 2009 it nearly quadrupled, making garlic one of the country’s best assets that year. Why? As in any other country and with any agricultural product, prices are dependent on many influences—floods and frost, supply and demand, and, in China, even influenza epidemics. Yes, the flu: economists at Morgan Stanley, an international financial adviser, theorized the trigger for the price increase might have been the H1N1 virus and the faith the Chinese have in garlic’s ability to ward off disease. A story in the China Daily bolstered this argument: it reported that a high school in Hangzhou, a city in eastern China, had bought enough garlic for all its students to eat every day at lunch so that they would stay healthy. John Huang says garlic’s medicinal properties affected its price in the beginning, but the weak global economy was likely a stronger influence. The garlic market suffered along with other markets, and when farmers began to receive less for their garlic, they started to plant less—about 50 percent less, in fact. Garlic became a valuable commodity for investment and the price went up. Stories abound about people who bought garlic, stored it, and waited for the price to climb higher. One story claims a young man in his early twenties borrowed money provided to the banks by the government to keep the economy going, bought a load of garlic, flipped it when the price went up, and used the proceeds to buy a Toyota.
“It’s true: in 2009 and 2010 speculators were successful in controlling the market,” says John Huang. “They bought garlic, held it back, and forced prices higher as supplies became limited.”
But then the expected happened: farmers planted more garlic because the price looked good. “More garlic, lower prices,” John says. “The 2011 crop is 30 percent more than 2010’s. Prices are dropping, dropping, dropping.”
My next-door neighbor’s father-in-law grows vegetables in the Holland Marsh region north of Toronto, the vegetable basket of the province, and sells them at the Ontario Food Terminal in Toronto. Let’s put that in the past tense—he used to grow them. In an over-the-fence conversation one day he tells my husband he’s switched from veggies to herbs. “I can’t compete with the price of Chinese imports,” he says.
In the United States, the garlic situation has changed slightly. Bill Christopher, Don’s son and a partner in the family company, says consumers and food distributors have become much more concerned about where their food is coming from and care more about buying local produce. “Food safety and traceability of food sources are important,” he says. “China’s smaller-than-usual crop enabled U.S. suppliers to retake some markets and explain the benefits of locally grown produce.”
But what’s next, now that China once again has a large crop to export?
“I think 2012 will be an interesting year,” he says.
Garlic is my salt and pepper.
MARGEE BERRY, first-prize winner, Great Garlic Cook-Off
I HAVE a special reason for being on time for Saturday’s Great Garlic Cook-Off: I’d entered a recipe in the contest months before and sometimes, in the moments before falling asleep, I’d fantasized about preparing the dish onstage and then modestly accepting a prize. Not necessarily first—second or third would do. Even being among the eight finalists would be grand.
My recipe didn’t even make the first cut. It’s a simple dish of steamed rapini sautéed in olive oil and chopped garlic (the rules require no less than 3 teaspoons, or 15 mL), served over soft garlic-and-basil polenta, and topped with a poached egg, with garlic-laced salsa fresca on the side. It’s one of my favorite breakfasts, one I came up with when I had some leftover rapini and polenta in the fridge, and I thought it was an easy but good-tasting recipe the judges might like. Once I see what the eight finalists—who’d been selected from hundreds of entries—are cooking up there on the stage, and what seasoned contest participants they are, I realize what I’d been up against. Their recipes are much more creative than mine. While the judges are tallying their results (and because I’d managed to wangle a media badge that allowed me on the Cook-Off Stage), I have a taste of Penny Malcolm’s Roasted Garlic, Blueberry, and Pear Cobbler with Garlic-Pecan Brickle Cream. “This is amazing,” I say as the flavors explode in my mouth. It’s sweet and savory, smooth and crunchy. And the subtle taste of garlic fits right in. Penny grins.
“I also entered a Brie pecan pie with garlic, but it didn’t make it to the finals, so don’t feel bad about yours,” she says. She’s come here from Americus, Georgia, to prepare her cobbler on stage. “This is the third time I’ve entered and the first time I made it to the finals. But unlike some of the other competitions I’ve been in, this one is pretty informal, so it’s easier.”
“The others?” I exclaim. “How many do you enter?”
“About twenty-four a year,” she says matter-of-factly.
“How many have you won?”
“Twelve. It can rule your life after a while.”
Penny’s amazing cobbler doesn’t win. Margee Berry’s Warm- Weather Watermelon Crabmeat-Kissed South Seas Soup takes first place. Margee’s no stranger to the Gilroy contest either. “I won third prize here about nine years ago, then second six years ago,” she says. She came from Trout Lake, Washington, the day before to shop for ingredients, as did the other contestants, who are expected to supply everything except the garlic. “Once you win you have to wait three years to enter again. But I figured I had a pattern going and this time I was sure to take first.”
Her cool soup has a contemporary combination of flavors perfect for a hot summer day. At first it’s sweet, then minty. The garlic appears and then backs off and you taste the ginger, the hot chilies and lemongrass. The flavors remain separate—just the way food is in Thailand.
Leslie Shearer’s Potentially Pretentious Pork Tenderloin with Garlic Five Ways takes second place. “You should have won first just for the name,” I say to her. Her big laugh fills the space between us. “It’s really poking a bit of fun at over-engineered restaurant food with complicated names,” she says. “I also figured it wouldn’t hurt to have a catchy name to make the judges take notice.”
They take notice—they smack their lips over Leslie’s pork. “That first taste of the garlic chip sealed it for me,” enthuses one. “Then the creamy goat cheese played off the pork and the tanginess and sweetness of the sauce.”
“The texture of the grit cakes was so sensual,” rhapsodizes another. “It’s the kind of food they ate in that movie Tom Jones. Fabulous treatment of garlic.”
The recipe contains four heads of roasted garlic and six cloves of sliced fried garlic, grits cooked in garlic-infused water, garlic powder, four cloves of minced garlic for roasting the pork, and... hmm, I guess that’s five ways. Also included: softened goat cheese, arugula tossed in the garlic-roasting oil, a reduction of balsamic vinegar and fig preserves, and the roasted pork, of course. “See what I mean?” says Leslie. “It’s definitely potentially pretentious.”
Suzy shows up waving a foot-long grilled and garlicky, beautifully buttery cob of corn.
“This is so delicious,” she calls. “Let’s go eat!”
And so we share more garlic-laden foods: barbecued pork on a bun, a large steamed artichoke filled with shrimp and crab Louis, and Cajun crawdads. What’s a festival without lots of food? Then we sample some local wine in the big and busy Rotary International tent and totter back to our bed-and-breakfast for a nap.
I wouldn’t go to Baskin-Robbins for it.
Overheard in the lineup for garlic ice cream
THE FIRST place I head Sunday morning is the lineup for garlic ice cream. There are about a dozen people waiting, and I have my little cone in my hand in no time. I lick. First it tasted like plain vanilla, then I get garlic on the back of my tongue, and it expands as the ice cream melts down my throat. Do I sound like a wine columnist? But when it comes down to it, it’s ice cream with a hint of garlic. I expect there’s no market for it beyond the festival.
I spend the rest of the day at the Garlic Showdown, where four professional chefs compete for a $5,000 prize, creating dishes on the spot with garlic and a mystery ingredient to be revealed when the contest begins. Very Iron Chef. The emcee is Fabio Viviani, successful West Coast restaurateur, cookbook author, and Top Chef’s Season 5 Fan Favorite (and winner of $10,000 for the distinction). He falls into his role right away, striding the stage like Mick Jagger, cracking jokes, promoting products, and engaging in crowd-pleasing hijinks while keeping track of the chefs’ progress for the audience.
This year’s special ingredient is mushrooms, and each chef is given a box of several varieties. They have an hour to prepare and present two dishes—after all, they are professionals—and most of them outdo themselves and come up with several. Ryan Scott, the defending champion, wins again. He owns Ryan Scott 2 Go catering in San Francisco, and even at his tender age (he’s in his mid-thirties) he’d been head chef at a couple of well-known Bay Area restaurants before opening his business. His winning recipe is in three parts: Perplexed Portobello Steak with Mushroom Purée and Mushroom Crudo. P alliterations seem to be in the air this weekend. “I named it that because the mushrooms are seared like a steak, so I figured they weren’t sure of their identities,” jokes Ryan. The mushrooms were plated on the garlic-mushroom purée and topped with mushroom jus from the pan and then mushroom crudo.
It’s well after two on the last day of the festival, and after watching the preparation of such elegant food and being denied even a mouthful, Suzy and I are ravenous. A Ryan Scott 2 Go booth is conveniently located directly across the field, and we hotfoot it over there with half the audience. We line up for sweet and succulent pulled pork and crisp coleslaw on a bun, but the garlic sweet-potato fries are sold out. It’s probably a good thing. By the time we’ve finished the pork we need to do a brisk round of the grounds and some final shopping to shake it down.
“Did you have a good time?” says the man at the media tent as we’re leaving.
“It was fabulous. I’m overwhelmed,” I say. “I don’t know how you do it.”
“I didn’t think I could have so much fun at a garlic festival,” says Suzy. “And for three whole days.”
And we both mean every mouthwatering word of it.
A day without garlic is a day without sunshine.
Sign outside a greengrocer in Lautrec, France
ON THE first day of our visit to Lautrec, Chris and I spot the pink garlic as soon as we walk past a little food shop on the narrow and cobblestoned Rue du Mercadial, just inside the village gate. Tightly tied bunches of perfectly round and uniformly plump garlic bulbs nestle together in a bin, glistening in a slanted ray of sunlight like pink satin. They look polished. I study them for a few moments before picking up a bunch, almost afraid to break the spell. I’ve come a long way to find this garlic.
I want to rip off the skin right away to see if the cloves inside are pink, but I resist the urge. The one-pound (450-gram) bunches, called manouilles, of nine identical bulbs sell for seven euros in village shops and at Lautrec’s Friday morning market. In the nearby city of Castres they’re nine or ten euros, and at Fauchon in Paris, twenty euros. In London they cost even more. It’s expensive garlic, and it’s important to Lautrec. Around the village more land is devoted to growing sunflowers than to garlic, but they don’t bring in as many euros as pink garlic. Pink garlic is grown on about 20 percent of the land but represents about 80 percent of the local agricultural economy.
The Fête de l’Ail Rose is the next day, and the villagers are preparing in a restrained French way. A few signs announce the one-day event and give locations for the judging of the garlic art (no kidding—sculptures and tableaus are made from every part of the plant, and some of them are worthy of display in your living room) and for the fabounade, the evening banquet, where the big cassoulet will be served after the ceremonial procession led by the Brotherhood of Pink Garlic. But no booths or tents are being set up—that will start before dawn on festival day. And there’s not a sign of preparations for the famous pink garlic soup, the festival’s main attraction, which brings people from miles around. It will be served to hundreds in the Place Centrale at noon sharp.
Although the scent of garlic is absent, the walled village of Lautrec (population under two thousand, in southwest France, about 53 miles, or 85 kilometers, from Toulouse) is rich with history, from its thirteenth-century corbelled and half-timbered houses to the faintly touristy clog maker’s workshop, the restored 1688 windmill, and the incredible trompe l’oeil frescoes in the Collegiate Church of Saint Rémy. They were painted about 1850 and rival the frescoes in many more prosperous European churches. The village even boasts a couple of parterres de broderie attributed to the great André Le Nôtre, who designed gardens at Versailles, Vaux-le-Vicomte, and Chantilly for Louis XIV.
By eating the good soup made with our garlic.You will live as long as our land has.Ail! Ail! Ail!
Song of the Brotherhood of Pink Garlic
A cross near the top of the hill that dominates Lautrec marks the site of the original home—or castle—of the viscounts of Toulouse and Lautrec, who founded the village about AD 1000. Yes, the late-nineteenth-century painter and printmaker Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec came by his name honestly: he was a descendant of the dynasty that built this little village, although he was born in Albi, an equally historic city about 18 miles (30 kilometers) distant. The hill was a well-chosen site for the family headquarters: from its height the countryside could be watched, and the village grew to need protection. The fertile soil made it prosperous agriculturally, as did an industry that produced a distinctive robin’s-egg-blue dye from the dried leaves of Isalis tinctoria (a member of the mustard family commonly called woad); like garlic today, the dye was a staple of the economics of the area before the days of indigo, and the color is seen on doors and shutters throughout Lautrec. Lautrec was also vulnerable because it was a Catholic fief in a predominantly non-Catholic area, and by 1338 it had become a fortress protected by a wall 4,000 feet (1,200 meters) long. A good portion of the ramparts and one of the original eight gates—the Porte de la Caussade, through which Chris and I entered—remain today. So does the hill, now castle-less but a lovely spot for contemplation, as we discover, shaded and grassy and outfitted with benches from which you can enjoy the cooling breeze and gaze out at the Lacaune Hills, the Black Mountains, and the plain of Castres. On a clear day you can see the Pyrenees in the distance.
IT’S NINE-THIRTY on Friday, the morning of the festival, and a hundred men and women resplendent in ceremonial robes are marching behind a brass band down Rue du Mercadial, singing the ode to pink garlic with unbridled enthusiasm—in French, of course, and to the tune of an old children’s song. Pauline Danigo, a young student of languages, has offered to help the French-challenged Canadian through the day, and she translates it for me.
The marchers, looking very serious and followed by dozens of festivalgoers, turn the corner where Pauline and I are standing—Chris is off taking pictures—and carefully pick their way down the steep, cobbled street to the théâtre de plein air, a stone amphitheater built over the subterranean silos where grain was stored in the Middle Ages. Proudly leading the pack are the men and women of the brotherhood, the Confrérie de l’Ail Rose, wearing deep green cloaks with puffy white sleeves and white straw fedoras. The brotherhoods that follow—the Confrérie de la Poule Farcie and the Confrérie de la Poule au Pot et Fromage de Barousse; the Confrérie de l’Omelette Géante and the confréries of tomatoes, mushrooms, cherries, truffles, and du Puy lentils; the Académie du Châteaubriant, supporters of the wines of Toulouse and Gaillac; and for some reason the brotherhood of stonecutters—are attired in embroidered satin and velvet like archbishops and cardinals on their way to an ordination. The bright orange velvet cloaks with feathery green collars worn by the carrots of Blagnac are crowd-pleasers, and everyone claps as they go by. Then they cheer for a plump white-haired gentleman with the Ordre de la Dive Bouteille de Gaillac, who rather dangerously jives down the steep street, grinning and loving the attention.
The French love their food and drink. There are more than six hundred confréries in twenty-six regions of the country, and many have been around since medieval times. The pink garlic brotherhood is a new kid in the group—it was organized in 2000. Each confrérie worships at the altar of its own gastronomic idol, celebrating and promoting it. “They’re pretty social groups, actually,” says Pauline, whose grandmother is a grower and has been a member of the garlic brotherhood since it began. “They’re always meeting and eating. I think they just like one another’s company.”
The confréries take their places on the stone seats of the little amphitheater, and the onlookers, including me, hang over the low wall or stand around in any available space. The speeches begin. “They’re saying how great it is to be together here today and that they’ll be bringing into the garlic brotherhood some new members from other groups, like the carrots, the omelettes, the Toulouse wine, the stonecutters, and the eel people—they’re from near Perpignan, on the Mediterranean,” Pauline says. There’s an eruption of laughter. “They like to tell funny anecdotes about each other, too.”
The inductees come up to the stage one by one, accompan-ied by a pink garlic brother or sister who stands behind and places a green cloak over each new member’s shoulders. “Those are the sponsors—they call them godmothers or godfathers,” Pauline says.
A long wooden staff bound at one end with sixteen pink garlic heads is handed to the Grand Chancellor, who solemnly touches both shoulders of the inductees and says a few words we can’t hear. Large bibs are tied around the new members’ necks.
“Initiation,” whispers Pauline, finger to her lips. It’s a solemn moment. A steaming pot is brought to the stage. “They have to eat a bowl of the pink garlic soup.”
The brotherhood bursts into song as the inductees carefully sip: “En mangeant la bonne soupe faite avec notre ail, vous vivrez comme naguère aussi vieux que notre terre. Ail! Ail! Ail!”
“But why do they sound like they’re pigs squealing at the end of the song?” I whisper back. “Are they implying the garlic stings your tongue?”
Pauline laughs. “It’s a French play on words,” she explains. “Ail means garlic but it’s pronounced like aïe, like when you say ‘Ouch!’ Repeating it three times is a custom here. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just there because it sounds good.”
I look blank. “I guess it’s a French thing,” says Pauline.
When the ceremony is over we find a bench and Pauline goes to look for her grandmother. Jacqueline Barthe joins us, removes her white fedora and fans her face. It might be hot, but she is an official and her cloak has to stay put for the ceremonial opening of the grand soup tasting in an hour. She pats her white bob and waits for me to say something. “She understands English pretty well, but she asked me to translate her answers,” Pauline says.
“Um, so how much garlic do you grow?” I begin. She’s trying to retire, she says, so she cut her acreage in half a couple of years ago, to 2.5 acres (1 hectare). “That’s four thousand kilos of garlic,” close to nine thousand pounds, she says.
“IS IT hard to meet all the requirements of the Syndicat? I understand the regulations are pretty tough.”
“If the weather is bad and it affects your garlic, they don’t penalize you. But if it’s you who’s made the mistake, you have two chances. The first year, a warning. The second year, fini!” She slaps her knee vehemently.
She was warned once for a small infraction that had nothing to do with the quality of the garlic: she’d left the lot number off her trays.
“And that was all?” I say in disbelief.
“The records must be perfect.” Madame Barthe looks stern. “There are rules for the Label Rouge and the IGP”—the Indication Géographique Protégée, or Protected Geographical Indication, a legal designation that protects the names of regional foods in much the same way as the appellation system controls wines. “Pink garlic is special, and we must keep it that way.”
“But what makes it such a special garlic?” I ask.
She turns directly to me. Her eyes flash.
“C’est le terroir!” she says emphatically. The chalky clay soil, dry and hard, the sun, and the right amount of rain give it the mellow taste and good storage qualities. There is only a small area with the right conditions for growing perfect pink garlic. Lautrec may seem like a quaint French village immersed in history, and its festival may not be big and showy, but its garlic growers know a thing or two about marketing and protecting their unique product. Chinese garlic wouldn’t dare compete with Ail Rose, not here, and not in Paris or London, either.
“Um, do you like to eat garlic yourself?” I ask Madame Barthe, feeling chastened.
“Ah, comme ci, comme ça,” she says, waving her hand. “I don’t put it in everything.”
“But she makes a really delicious garlic pie,” says Pauline. “The whole family adores it. It gave her the idea to start a garlic pie contest at the festival.”
“I like the garlic soup best,” Madame Barthe says. “This year it won a new designation for Lautrec—Site Remarquable du Goût, which the state awards to a place that offers extra-special food or drink.” She looks pleased and proud but suggests we should hurry along to the Place Centrale if we want to watch the soup making. “It will be ready to eat soon,” she says.
Place Centrale is jammed with hundreds of people pressing up against a metal barrier that keeps them away from the cooking area, which is under the wooden loggia of the beautifully restored brick market building. Although they’re dressed in contemporary gear and are waiting patiently, I suddenly have an image of peasants outside Louis XVI’s palace clamoring for bread. Or would that be cake?
“The cooking area is also the VIP area,” says Pauline. “My grandmother said we can go in there to watch and get our soup.”
And watch we do, Chris, Pauline, and I, while sniffing the intoxicating aroma of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cloves of pink garlic making themselves into an ambrosial soup. Time moves backward, and I relive the moment decades ago when Joe and I walked into Luca’s Italian restaurant and I met garlic nose-on for the first time. Six cauldrons are being stirred over propane burners, a thousand liters of garlic soup, about 250 gallons. Will everyone waiting go away happy, a bowl of soup in hand, or might there be a revolution?
One woman is clearly in charge, and she has twenty assistants. They started at eight that morning, filling the cauldrons with water and bringing it to the boil. Once the water reached the right temperature, hundreds of cloves of finely chopped pink garlic were added. I watch mustard and huge cans of mayonnaise go in, then broken pieces of vermicelli. Young men with dependable muscles constantly stir the mixture to keep it smooth. And the boss lady appears every so often to dip her ladle in and taste. Stirring and tasting, stirring and tasting. We mill about sipping white wine with the VIPs and a small television crew. Outside the barrier, the crowd remains patient. Some of the older people sit in rows of chairs set up for the soup event. “People come early and stand in the square for hours,” says Pauline.
The soup is worth the wait. It’s strong, sweet, smooth, and simple all at once, with “strong” being the operative word. It tastes overwhelmingly of garlic, but mellow garlic. The vermicelli makes a perfect balance of texture. “This is the best soup I’ve ever tasted,” says Chris. As we slurp our soup the rest is being ladled into plastic bowls and passed out to the first row pressing against the barrier, along with a glass of wine for each. How do people manage to turn and carry the hot soup and cold wine back through the crowd behind them without spilling? The French are more adept than me.
Meanwhile, the garlic pies are arriving at the judging center across the square, carried in by husbands or the bakers themselves in boxes or on trays covered with plastic wrap held up by toothpicks to protect the filling. There are fourteen entries by deadline time. I crane my neck through a three-deep row of onlookers to watch as the pies are gently unwrapped, given numbers, and placed in a refrigerated glass case. To a pie they’d been baked in those scalloped French tarte pans with removable bottoms, a lovely concept fraught with the specter of broken pastry and a ruined pie when you try to slide it off the bottom. These pies slide off perfectly intact. Is it the skill of the unpacker or the perfect texture of the pâte brisée?
Anyone can enter the contest Madame Barthe originated. The pie can be sweet or savory and made with any ingredients, as long as garlic is one of them. Judges are chefs and food industry people, and they like originality and creative decoration as well as good taste. I like the pie decorated with a spray of carrots, made by a member of the carrot brotherhood. The winner, made by Lautrec’s own Fernande Corbeil, is equally beautiful, judging by its photograph, but I don’t see it until later; it’s a zucchini and rice pie containing eight cloves of garlic, eggs, cheese, and a soupçon of tomato sauce, and the top is decorated with a large flower made of zucchini carved into petals and leaves and centered with a bulb of pink garlic.
THE WINNERS of the garlic art contest, judged early this morning, are on display in a room on the other side of Rue du Mercadial, only a few steps away. But to get there we have to squeeze past a platoon of school majorettes twirling batons to a brass band and pick our way through a crowd that’s gathered to watch the manouille contest. Tying a manouille for market is considered an art in France: the garlic stem is cut back to about 8 inches (20 centimeters), the roots are trimmed off, and the outer layers of skin are carefully removed until the glossy pink inner skin is exposed. Then the stems are wrapped and tied tightly together, stalk by stalk. It’s the best way to package Lautrec’s pink garlic because its stalks are rigid once the plants are cured. In the festival contest six growers take turns tying a giant manouille on long tables joined together under the loggia where we ate our bowls of soup only a couple of hours ago; the goal is to beat last year’s record in a three-hour limit, but not by too much. This group is moving fast.
“If it gets too long it will be hard to beat the record the next year,” says Pauline. “The aim is to progress regularly so it stays competitive.”
The cook who can employ [garlic] successfully will be found to possess the delicacy of perception, the accuracy of judgment, and the dexterity of hand which go to the formation of a great artist.
MRS. W.G. WATERS, author of The Cook’s Decameron: A Study in Taste (1901)
THE WINNING garlic sculpture is a 3-foot (1-meter) hot-air balloon made of overlapping translucent garlic skins floating over a garlic foliage landscape. Watching the balloon from below are garlic-bulb people wearing clogs carved from garlic cloves standing on a pathway made of chopped-garlic gravel edged with garlic-clove stones. Other entrants include an Eiffel Tower of garlic bulbs, and a life-size store mannequin dressed in a frothy gown of garlic skins. My favorite is the proud garlic rooster: he rises tall on realistic feet made of tiny garlic bulbils; his tail is a graceful sweep of garlic scapes; his comb and wattle shake their purple garlic skins. He stands regally displaying second prize, although in my mind he should have won first.
The rooster triggered thoughts of chicken in my subconscious, and I’m suddenly peckish. “Me too,” says Chris, and we set out on a search for food. We look in vain for a food stall, because the booths in the marketplace are selling hats and jewelry, pottery, soaps, and rainbow-colored macaroons. A man is demonstrating a whiz of a garlic cutter, and I buy one. Eventually I see a man stirring a cauldron of a creamy white mixture. More soup? Aligot, says his sign.
“What is that?” I ask Pauline.
“Aligot is a specialty at festivals around here,” she says. “It’s mashed potatoes stirred and stirred with lots of fresh cheese till it gets really smooth. You buy a plastic plate of it and eat it with a spoon, or you get a container and take it home for dinner.”
“May I have some?” I ask the man.
“Non, non, it’s not ready yet,” he says, stirring the mixture around and around, lifting it high into the air and then stirring more. When we return in half an hour it’s smooth and elastic, ready for eating. Chris and I dip into a plateful.
“It needs garlic,” I say.
“Je regrette,” says the man. “I have none.”
We remedy that easily enough—we return to the man demonstrating the garlic cutter, get a nice rounded spoonful of freshly chopped garlic, and stir it into our aligot. Now it’s perfect, smooth and cheesy with a good hit of garlic, a concentrated purée of flavors. It holds us over until the fabounade, scheduled for seven-thirty in the boulodrome just outside the village walls, the grand finale of the day.
While we’re changing for the event and having a glass of wine from Gaillac in our room, I eye the manouille I purchased at the shop yesterday, sitting on the mantel. Should I try to smuggle it home, or should I cut into a clove and sample it now, in case I get caught and thrown in jail and never get to taste it? I’m almost afraid to—what if I’m disappointed? But the garlic wins. I came here to find Ail Rose, and now that it’s within my reach I have to see if it lives up to its billing.
I remove a clove, use my travel corkscrew to take off the skin, and bite down hard.
The garlic hits my wine-soaked tongue sharply but mellows out almost immediately. It’s—different. Garlicky, naturally, but not strongly sulfurous. Sort of musky. The taste reaches a plateau and lingers beautifully.
I sigh with relief. It’s good. But the flesh is creamy white, like that of every other garlic in the world. Was I really hoping it would be pink, like the skin? And what subgroup does Ail Rose belong to? To the French it’s simply the best garlic in the world, and its subgroup is irrelevant. Just by looking at it I know it’s not from the Artichoke subgroup, like Gilroy’s ‘California Early’ with its many layers of bulging cloves and irregular shape. Ail Rose is compact and almost round, with each clove nearly identical in size and shape. It’s perfect, as Madame Barthe says.
It’s not until I get home and find a grower in the southern United States who lists ‘Rose de Lautrec’ on his website that I discover it’s probably a Creole and originated in Spain. Perhaps that’s where that mysterious medieval traveler came from with his precious garlic in his pocket, since Spain isn’t far from this region of France. It’s a fanciful story, but there may be some truth to it after all. Creoles are among the rarest of garlics and are sometimes difficult to find, and they’re good to eat fresh because of their sweet, mellow flavor combined with heat. They’re also known to last a long time, sometimes as long as the next year’s harvest, in the right storage conditions.
As to whether I smuggled home the rest of the manouille, my lips are sealed.
A garlic caress is stimulating. A garlic excess soporific.
MAURICE EDMOND SAILLAND, aka Curnonsky
THE FABOUNADE is fabulous, even if we can’t speak more than a few words to our fellow diners. I guess we look French enough because several people sit down beside us and try to strike up conversations. But they give up after “Bonsoir” or “Joli soir” and move off to find another location.
The thirteen hundred of us—moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas, and kids of all ages—sit on benches at long paper-covered tables. We sip local wine as a band from a nearby village travels around the tables playing universal favorites like “When the Saints Come Marching In.” People clap and sing as we wait for the confréries to march in and dinner to begin.
In due time they arrive, moving slowly to their theme song. Then the grande manouille is carried in on planks held aloft by a dozen men and women. It’s nearly 74 feet (22.5 meters), the longest in the festival’s history and about 6@ inches (17 centimeters) longer than last year’s. Now I realize why it can’t get too much longer each year—the men and women of the garlic brotherhood wouldn’t be able to carry it in.
Dinner, served by volunteers, is melon and ham followed by cassoulet topped with duck leg confit. It’s a homey dish, the duck a bit overcooked and the white beans nicely soft and soupy. But as with the aligot, there isn’t enough garlic. In fact, I don’t think there’s any. I have to remember we’re in France, not Italy, and although the French like garlic, they never use it as liberally as Italians or even many North Americans, and sometimes not at all if they deem it unnecessary. Dessert is a square of lemon tart cut from a large bakery-made sheet. As Jacqueline Barthe would say, comme ci, comme ça.
As soon as the band strikes up after dinner, masses of people get up to dance. Women dance with women, children with children. And the men dance—they steer their partners expertly around the floor doing little box steps or waltzes, and they look happy about it.
But after a while we have nothing left to say to each other as well as no one else to talk to. It’s time to leave. On the short walk back to our lodgings, I think about the evening. The menu wasn’t the same, but the home-style meal reminded me of the turkey suppers held in Ontario villages and towns in the fall, the fried chicken fetes I’ve heard about in the southern states, or the summer lobster feasts and fish fries on the East Coast. But there was a difference: the French dinner had more joie de vivre. The French have their conservative, rule-following side, but then they totally abandon themselves to the enjoyment of food and wine and just being together in the moment. We could learn something from them.
The Canadian garlic festivals I’ve been to are informative, even educational, with lectures and demonstrations; unlike Gilroy and Lautrec, they offer many varieties of garlic to buy for planting or storing. The Canadian festivals are earnest and sincere and practical. Like Canadians? Gilroy’s festival is pure Hollywood, but the organizers know how to run a big professional operation that’s both slick and friendly, and the festival has made millions for local charitable organizations. The Fête de l’Ail Rose—well, it’s French. It has innate style and class, plus a historical setting no place in North America can possibly match. Yet it’s honest and down to earth; garlic is celebrated, but it stays suitably in the background. It’s like a medieval fair without the bearbaiting and cockfighting.
I wonder what garlic festivals are like in Romania, where my little vegetable earned its reputation as a mighty vampire killer, or in Tajikistan, where it was first domesticated.
· TURNING HOURS INTO DOLLARS ·
The nonprofit Gilroy Garlic Festival does more than promote garlic: it raises money for local charities through general admission, Gourmet Alley foods, and booth rentals. More than $8 million has been raised since 1979. In addition, each person volunteering at the festival “earns” a theoretical wage based on hours worked, which is then donated to the charity of the volunteer’s choice. In recent years this has ranged from $85.35 given to a wildlife education center to more than $10,000 to Gilroy High School’s choir.
· WHERE GARLIC GROWS ·
In 2008, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations came up with a list of the top ten garlic producers in the world. Figures are in tonnes.
China 12,088,000
India 645,000
South Korea 325,000
Egypt 258,608
Russia 254,000
United States 221,810
Spain 142,400
Argentina 140,000
Myanmar 128,000
Ukraine 125,000
· WHAT’S IN A LABEL? ·
Pink garlic was grown informally around Lautrec until 1959, when several young producers formed the Syndicat de Défense du Label Ail Rose de Lautrec to improve growing and marketing practices. In 1966 the garlic was awarded the Label Rouge, which officially identifies quality and is an award of prestige in France. About 185 growers and three packaging houses are now part of the Syndicat de Défense du Label Rouge et de l’IGP Ail Rose de Lautrec, growing garlic in the southwestern department of Tarn. Yield hovers between 660 and 770 tons (600 to 700 tonnes) annually.
In 1996 pink garlic received an IGP, the Indication Géographique Protégée, a European label that certifies that agricultural products have been grown in a specified area in the framework of IGP-PGI rules and have been checked by the awarding body.
· SMALL BUT MIGHTY ·
The one-day Fête de l’Ail Rose de Lautrec began in 1970 and always takes place the first Friday in August. It attracts close to ten thousand people, though arriving at that figure is an inexact science, because admission is not charged. The organizers do informal head counts in the square a couple of times during the day, especially when the garlic soup is being served and the biggest crowd is in attendance.
Sixty or seventy volunteers are involved, and the expense budget is about £25,000. Promoting pink garlic and Lautrec is the festival’s main goal, but each year it donates about £400 to a charitable association, usually for disabled children.