In Pursuit of Garlic (3 page)

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.