In Pursuit of Garlic (4 page)

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.