Scents and sensibilities at the garlic stand in the Mumbai market
One of the most luxurious things I have ever seen, something that made me yearn to put down roots and buy a place, was in Crawford Market in central Mumbai. Just a few minutes’ walk from the main railway station of India’s largest city, this is a place built in the late 19th century seemingly to look like a market in some provincial English town. Its eccentric mix of styles – of ecclesiastical windows and Moorish arches – might seem out of place in heaving, sweltering Mumbai except that the city is filled with striking contrasts of architecture. Low-rise slums sit at the feet of vast and outrageously decadent, modern apartment towers, there are Victorian civic buildings and inconsequential office blocks. And much of it all veiled in shades of grey and black; the city’s pollution literally etched in to its fabric. A sign hanging on a building being refurbished reads like a metaphor for the city: “Work in progress”.
And there, in the heart of this famous market where you can buy everything from a live chicken to a mango, was this pile of luxurious beauty; a mound of garlic. Stacked perfectly like some fragile pyramid, and not mere bulbs but peeled cloves.
I had rounded a corner, tiring almost as one often does from the endless colourful little hillocks of spice. A gentle fragrance wafted over me as I found myself in a quieter, almost sleepy spot of the market. Indeed, the sheer soporificity of this corner of the market seemed to have rendered stallholders and young boys drowsy, and I could see many sleeping beside, under and at the back of stalls. And there was this garlic, the source of the smell, raw, peeled and tempting.
What a state of civilisation a place becomes when the cook can buy a whole kilo of garlic ready-peeled, and not chopped and shoved into some jar of oil and then doubtless pasteurised and made sharp and tangy and bitter and horrible.
No one likes to peel garlic. It’s so itsy bitsy and time-consuming, the smells getting under the nails and stuck to your fingers for hours.
Then, of course, as you ponder the luxury of the peeled, you realise that some other poor soul has had to do it… small fingers perhaps, tearing, peeling since dawn, day in day out. And you ask yourself, is this in fact advancement or regression? So perhaps it’s kinder to buy the unpeeled stuff and then do a Jamie Oliver in the kitchen and bang it open with knife, except when I do that it just squashes it.
As is often frustratingly the case for a traveller, I was passing through Mumbai and had no kitchen and no need to buy garlic, so it just stayed in my mind. And it helped to cleanse my memory of the meat section of Crawford Market; a more grim, Danté’s Inferno-esque vision that I almost tremble to describe: crows sitting on meat hanging on hooks… the whiff and sight of blood on stone and the buzz of flies. A sight that makes the decision to go veggie on trips to India not just sensible but compulsory…
And so back to the garlic: that cleansing, vital ingredient in so many dishes. Whether they’re the varieties hanging in French markets with an almost blue hue, or if you can manage to grow your own, it gets me thinking of garlic’s magical qualities. I love it almost stinging my mouth in a fresh gazpacho – needing a chilled glass of Fina sherry to fight back – or roasted whole, soft and rich with a fat chicken.
The late Bernard Loiseau, at his three-Michelin-starred restaurant in Burgundy, cooked and chilled garlic about six times to remove its astringency before serving it with parsley and frogs’ legs. I bet some poor sod in a classic French restaurant right now wishes he could get it fresh and peeled.
As I write, a part of Crawford Market is smouldering after a small blaze. I wonder if the flames reached and licked the garlic quarter. As the smell of those roasted cloves wafted over the city, one’s emotions would be bittersweet.