GARLIC

It is the mid-eighteenth century. A Spanish officer, magnificent on horseback, comes trotting up to a Hia-Ced O’odham, one of the Sand People of the formidable desert of southwestern Arizona, produces a map-inprogress, and demands to know where he is. The Indian woman, shrugging her shoulders—for she does not speak Spanish, nor he O’odham— guesses what he is after, and says something like ‘‘aw’a-ho,’’ pointing to the jagged mountains nearby. Aha, the conquistador thinks; there must be a garlic field at their base, for that is just what ajo means in his language. Thus Ajo, Arizona, it has ever been, and though a native member of the lily family, Hesperocallis undulata, grows nearby and tastes a little like garlic, the woman was really saying, ‘‘The place where the red clay for paint comes from,’’ a different thing altogether. Still, our hypothetical soldier can be forgiven for longing for garlic, long a staple of the Spanish diet and other cuisines of the Mediterranean region.
Indeed, without garlic, those foodways would be very different indeed. Garlic, Allium sativum, has been a presence in the Mediterranean for at least five thousand years. It was almost certainly brought in from Mesopotamia, though its origins lie farther to the east, in Central Asia; its closest wild counterpart comes from the mountains of eastern Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkistan. A cousin to onions, leeks, and shallots, it is different from other Allium species in growing entirely underground, its presence signaled by thin green stalks with a whitish, pleasant-looking flower.
It is like many other Allium kin, though, in taking a long time to grow. The poet laureate of garlic, New Mexico writer and farmer Stanley Crawford, observes, ‘‘One of the singular characteristics of garlic is that it makes you wait. For radishes and spinach, you need to wait only a month or so. For lettuce or carrots or summer squash or green beans you can begin to taste the results of your plantings in two months. Tomatoes and eggplants and peppers and winter squash take another month. But for garlic you must wait seven to nine months from the time you plant to the time you harvest, and during perhaps half of the growing cycle there is little to look at besides a few shoots sticking up here and there in a row.’’
It is well worth waiting for, of course. Garlic has a certain hard-to-express deliciousness that makes it a highly prized commodity among the cognoscenti, even though it is repellent to vampires and the olfactorily squeamish. In the last category, we can count the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, who warned that not only did garlic smell on its own, but it also produced some supercharged flatulence. We can count, too, the Roman poet Horace, who, though born in the garlic-loving Italian province of Lucania, seems not to have had a taste for the plant.
His Epode III proclaims, Parentis olim siquis impia manu senile guttur fregerit, edit cicutis alium nocentius. That is to say, ‘‘If there were ever a case where a boy throttled his old dad to death, I’d sentence him to eat garlic, far more noxious than hemlock,’’ and which goes on to add that the fire of a good dose of garlic feels in his stomach very much like a viper’s poison, and which concludes that anyone who eats the stuff will have to sleep on the opposite side of the bed and be content to live without the poet’s kisses.
The Roman aristocracy seems to have shared some of Horace’s ideas, including the thought that anyone who smelled of garlic was a victim of poor breeding and therefore not really a candidate for mixing with the ancient jet set, who had plenty of prejudices but perhaps not much self-control when it came to putting things into their bodies. Those hedonists would probably have been unimpressed by the fact that garlic packs a great deal of punch, nutritionally speaking: a bulb of raw garlic, even the rather insipid white-skinned elephant garlic now making inroads into the world market, contains goodly quantities of vitamin C and potassium, as well as a small but meaningful amount of protein, about 8 percent of the bulb by weight. Moreover, many of its compounds, some not yet fully described, suggest that garlic is a singular pharmacopoeia. It has demonstrated medicinal uses as an antiseptic, antifungal, and antibiotic agent, for instance, for which reason field doctors in the classical world treated wounded soldiers with poultices laced with chunks of garlic.

A group of those compounds, called disulfides, offers an effective treatment for malaria; one series of medical tests conducted in 2003 showed that most of the individual disulfides were effective against Plasmodium falciparum, the malaria parasite, and were also effective in killing cancer cells, which opens the door to a whole new world of possibilities. The most powerful of the disulfides—happily, our conquistador might say, called ajoene—inhibits a process called glutathione reduction, which promotes cellular damage; ajoene, an anticoagulant, also seems to burn away serum cholesterol.
Ajoene and its congener diallyl sulfide (DAS) may help ward off the chemical PhIP given off by meat cooked at high temperatures, a suspected carcinogen given especially to expressing itself in breast cancer; one medical researcher remarked of an experiment, ‘‘We treated human breast epithelial cells with equal amounts of PhIP and DAS separately, and the two together, for periods ranging from three to 24 hours. PhIP induced expression of the cancer-causing enzyme at every stage, up to 40-fold, while DAS completely inhibited the PhIP enzyme from becoming carcinogenic.’’
As another researcher working on the uses of the compounds admits, their only drawback, commercially, is that they smell strongly of, well, garlic, yet another reason for the olfactorily oversensitive to get over it and embrace this slivered bullet. That pungent, sulfurous smell caused an ancient naturalist, Dioscorides, to recommend garlic as a vermifuge—that is, an agent to expel worms from the body. Too, the great Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder noted, garlic’s smell is enough to drive away serpents and snakes, which should be of much interest to those who worry about such things. One test of this might be to comb the low hills bordering the great garlic fields of Gilroy, California, for signs of these creatures, for Gilroy lies at the very heart of American garlic production, its downtown even boasting a couple of shops where you can buy garlic ice cream and other improbable concoctions.  Of more ordinary use is a recipe an Iranian doctor once gave me: remove the papery outer skin of enough garlic bulbs to fill a large glass jar. Add the bulbs to the jar, then fill it with balsamic vinegar. Add some chopped chile pepper and a few slices of raw beet, then seal the jar and put it away in a cool, dark corner for six years. Thereafter, he assured me, you will have the most powerful weapon yet known to humankind in the battle against the common cold; when you feel the snuffles coming on, eat a bulb and go to bed, and your troubles will melt away. Even outside a jar, garlic lasts a long while. In my refrigerator, which suffers from my packrat habits in any event, bits and pieces of it tend to hang around much longer than they should; when you see green shoots emerging from the bulbs, I have since learned, it is time either to plant the old soldier or give it a decent burial. Keep it in the open air, rather than encased in plastic bags or wrap, and it will last still longer—a lesson for all of us.

ROASTED GARLIC
Pureed garlic makes a fine addition to tomato sauces, bouillabaisse, pilaf, and other dishes, and it can be eaten as a spread on fresh or toasted bread. This simple Spanish recipe yields only half a cup of the stuff, which is enough to last through several dishes, so powerful is it.
3 bulbs white garlic
3 teaspoons olive oil
1 teaspoon sea salt
Remove skin from garlic bulbs and place in a ramekin or small ovenproof baking dish. Cover halfway with boiling water and add a teaspoon of olive oil. Cover the dish and bake at 375°F for forty-five minutes, adding more boiling water halfway through. Remove from oven to a small glass bowl, add two teaspoons of olive oil and the sea salt, and mash with a pestle or hand-held blender.

WALNUT-GARLIC SAUCE
This Sardinian sauce, its origins lost in time, accompanies ocean fish such as red snapper, dorado, or monkfish. It is adapted from the adaptation found in Marlena de Blasi’s Regional Foods of Southern Italy, which contains a lovely recipe for the fish itself.
1 bulb garlic, peeled
1 cup chopped basil leaves
1 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 teaspoons sea salt
Black pepper to taste
1/2 cup red wine vinegar
1 cup finely chopped walnuts
1/2 cup pine (or pin˜on) nuts
Chop garlic into a fine paste. Saute´ for just a few seconds in heated olive oil. Mix into a large bowl, and add sea salt, pepper, and vinegar. Add walnuts and pine nuts.
A more elaborate variant of this recipe comes from the 1529 Spanish cookbook Libro de Guisados, compiled by Ruperto de Nola, the Italian born head cook of the Spanish regent of Naples. The proportions are inexact in the original and should be adapted in the modern kitchen to suit the chef’s taste—in other words, as with all ancient recipes, think of this as experimental.
Pine-Nut Sauce of Garlic. Take a pound of pine nuts and another of peeled almonds and pound them with mortar and pestle, first separately and then together. Simmer two peeled bulbs of garlic in chicken broth. When it is soft, pound it together with the nut paste. Then add grated cheese, and half a dozen hardboiled eggs, and some more chicken broth, and a spoonful of sugar, and a little vinegar mixed with rosewater, crushed cloves, ginger, cinnamon, and pepper. Cook this slowly until it thickens.

PARTHIAN LAMB
The Parthian, or Persian, nation was a source of constant wonderment for the Greeks and Romans. Apicius, the Roman cookbook writer, called this recipe ‘‘Parthian,’’ and although some of it is garbled—Parthian may be a misunderstanding for pithium, a kind of spice, or pasticum, which means ‘‘still nursing’’—it makes for an interesting excursion into ancient ideas of deliciousness. The garlic in this recipe is a stand-in for a now-lost related plant called laser pithium, which grew in Central Asia and was probably introduced to North Africa by Phoenician sailors. The story is that the plant was so popular that it was nearly extinct by Nero’s time, and when the last known plant was brought to Rome, Nero ate it himself, the better to tune his fiddle with.

5 pounds lamb
1 pound pitted prunes, soaked in water
3 large onions, chopped
1 tablespoon nuoc mam sauce
1/2 cup olive oil
2 tablespoons savory
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 garlic cloves, mashed
1 cup white wine
Salt and pepper to taste
Place lamb in a large roasting pan and rub with olive oil, chopped garlic, and salt and pepper. Cook in a preheated oven at 325°F for two hours. Baste with white wine periodically. Saute´ the chopped onions in the remaining olive oil over low heat for 15 minutes. Add salt, pepper, savory, prunes, nuoc mam sauce, and mashed garlic cloves. Cook over low heat or 15 minutes. Pour the sauce over lamb and bake for 15 minutes.

By Gregory McNamee in the book 'MOVABLE FEASTS- The History, Science, and Lore of Food', Praeger Pubrishers, Westpoint U.S.A & London, 2007, p. 85-90. Edited an illustrated to be postedd by Leopoldo Costa.