In Pursuit of Garlic

“Of all the authors of articles and books liz primeau liz written over the years about garlic, Liz Primeau’s In Pursuit of Garlic is supreme.” chester aaron, author of The Great Garlic Book su “Finally we get another fine piece of written work from pur it o n f Liz Primeau! The power of garlic takes on new meaning with this i book. You will not look at a clove of garlic the same ever again.” Mark cullen, gardening expert and writer-broadcaster www.markcullen.com “Incredibly well researched, with a wealth of information ALIC on this magical plant and great recipes too, this book will certainly find a valued place in my culinary library.” ALIC inpursuit of John Bishop, chef-restaurateur and author of AN INTIMATE LOOK AT THE Simply Bishop’s: Easy Seasonal Recipes DIVINELY ODOROUS BULB liz priMeau is the author of My Natural History and the bestselling Front Yard Gardens. She is also the founding editor of Canadian Gar- Liz Primeau dening magazine and gives talks about gardening across North America. She lives in Mississauga, Ontario. $19.95 www.greystonebooks.com Cover design by Heather Pringle Cover photograph by Julie Mcinnes/Getty Images Printed in Canada on fsc-certified paper Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West Ebook also available Garlic.Cvr.Final.indd 1 12-01-11 3:42 PM In Pursuit of Garlic Garlic.Int.05.indd 1 12-01-11 3:43 PM Garlic.Int.05.indd 2 12-01-11 3:43 PM rsuit pu o in f ALIC AN INTIMATE LOOK AT THE DIVINELY ODOROUS BULB Liz Primeau d&m publishers inc. Vancouver/Toronto/Berkeley Garlic.Int.05.indd 3 12-01-11 3:43 PM Copyright © 2012 by Liz Primeau 12 13 14 15 16 5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777. Greystone Books An imprint of D&M Publishers Inc. 2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201 Vancouver bc Canada v5t 4s7 www.greystonebooks.com Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada isbn 978-1-55365-601-2 (pbk.) isbn 978-1-55365-602-9 (ebook) Editing by Nancy Flight Cover and text design by Heather Pringle Cover photograph by Julie Mcinnes/Getty Images Illustration by Liz Primeau Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens Text printed on acid-free, 30% post-consumer paper Distributed in the U.S. by Publishers Group West We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities. Garlic.Int.05.indd 4 12-01-11 3:43 PM # Contents # 1 · A Divine Stink 1 Garlic in History, Lore, Medicine, and More 2 · A Pungent Love AffAir 25 The Art of Eating Garlic 3 · Down to eArth with gArLic 51 How to Plant, Feed, Harvest, and Store Your Amazing Bulbs 4 · ceLebrAting gArLic 83 Two Festivals and a Universal Passion for Garlic 5 · in the kitchen with gArLic 129 How to Chop, Preserve, and Cook with Garlic A GarLic Primer 171 What to Plant and How It Tastes Acknowledgments 183 sources 186 Index 191 Garlic.Int.05.indd 5 12-01-11 3:43 PM Garlic.Int.05.indd 6 12-01-11 3:43 PM 1 A DIVINE STINK Garlic in History, Lore, Medicine, and More The bulb, an oriental palace shrouded in gray and lavender paper, splits open into a heap of wedge-shaped packets ... david young, “Chopping Garlic” Garlic.Int.05.indd 1 12-01-11 3:43 PM Garlic.Int.05.indd 2 12-01-11 3:43 PM y garlic bulb, freed from the earth by my trusty trowel, is a moon more than a palace, a pearly orb with M smears of dirt making a miniature Sea of Tranquility on its newborn skin. It’s not as round as a moon, but it is undu- lating and sensual, with papery curves that hide Dracula’s-fang cloves, their flavor so pungent that if I bite into one right away, it will sear my tongue and burn all the way down my throat. But I won’t do that. Garlic needs to mature and ripen to develop its best flavor, unlike carrots or parsnips or potatoes, which are at their crisp and sweetest best soon after they’re pulled from the ground. Garlic is an opposite sort of root vegetable, whose taste improves with some age, becoming deeper and more layered. I’ve cooked and savored this divinely odorous bulb, botani- cally known as Allium sativum, for many more years than I’ve 3 Garlic.Int.05.indd 3 12-01-11 3:43 PM 4 · in pursuit of garlic grown it, but growing it has made me respect it. It’s one tough little dude, a survivor with a history as long as the potato, and like the potato it’s generally taken for granted. It’s seen the rise and fall of civilizations and cultures and has made an appearance in the life of almost everyone who’s ever lived. For about ten thousand years garlic has been many things: in Neolithic times it was a dependable food that could be kept fresh and edible in a cool cave for months. It’s been a flavoring, a giver of strength, a healer, and a preventer of disease, and today it’s being seriously studied for its medicinal value. It shows up in literature, poetry, art, and architecture—early in the twentieth century Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí built a stylized garlic dome over an air vent on Barcelona’s Casa Batlló, perhaps his take on the more familiar onion dome of Spain’s Moorish history. Clay replicas of garlic or the real thing were buried with pharaohs and ancient kings to nourish and keep them safe from evil spirits as they passed into the great beyond. Images of garlic sometimes show up on hamsas, the hand-shaped amulets that protect against evil in the Middle East and North Africa. Garlic has appeared in paintings—two examples are Diego Velásquez’s A Young Woman Crushing Garlic and Vincent Van Gogh’s Still Life with Bloaters and Garlic—and references to garlic abound in literature. Shakespeare often alluded to it, usually disparagingly, in his plays; Cervantes, in Don Quixote de la Mancha, was critical of the smell of garlic on Dulcinea’s breath; and one of Guy de Maupassant’s characters in “The Rondoli Sisters” is downright disgusted by people who “carry about them the sickening smell of garlic.” But in “Mandalay,” Garlic.Int.05.indd 4 12-01-11 3:43 PM 5 · A Divine Stink Rudyard Kipling speaks lyrically of garlic: “You won’t ’eed nothin’ else / But them spicy garlic smells, / An’ the sunshine an’ the palm-trees and the tinkly temple-bells; / on the road to Mandalay...” Garlic has also been used as currency. If I’d been an Egyptian four thousand years ago with a sackful of garlic bulbs to barter, I could have bought a healthy slave to help me with my garden. That sounds like a better deal than paying the neighborhood teenagers twelve bucks an hour to pull weeds and prune the hedge. Garlic had intrinsic value, too: if I’d been a stonemason working on a pyramid a millennium before that, I’d have been issued garlic every day to keep me strong and disease free. A record of labor costs inscribed on the Great Pyramid of Cheops showed that sixteen thousand talents of silver was spent during one bookkeeping period to feed garlic, onions, and radishes to the thousands of pyramid builders. A talent was an ancient unit of mass, the amount of water that would fill an amphora, and it was also used to measure precious metals. It’s impossible to compare ancient and modern measurements or monetary values, but if one Egyptian talent was equivalent to 80 Roman libra, or about 57 pounds (26 kilograms), as Pliny said a couple of millennia later, these three humble vegetables were worth a lot indeed. But more than painting or writing about garlic, or buying slaves with it, humans have always liked to eat garlic, whether it was considered good for your health or not. The Mesopotamians, a civilized people who lived in what is now mainly Iraq four thousand years ago, enjoyed garlic with abandon. Forty recipes inscribed on three clay tablets from about 1900 bc (translated Garlic.Int.05.indd 5 12-01-11 3:43 PM 6 · in pursuit of garlic from the cuneiform in the 1980s by French scholar Jean Bottéro and now part of Yale University’s Babylonian Collection) use garlic and leeks liberally. The favorite technique was to mash and squeeze them through a cloth so that the juices were released into a pot of, say, mutton stew with beets and cumin. Garlic’s green tops didn’t go to waste either—they were marinated in vinegar and used to garnish the bowl. Dear actors, eat no onions or garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath. bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream As the centuries rolled by, garlic’s reputation as a health ben- efit didn’t waver.

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