GOOD GARLIC GONE BAD
W hen my man has been down at the pub, I can tell immediately. He doesn’t need to come within close range for me to pick it up; one wretched whiff gives it away. Please don’t touch the stuff, I plead before he heads out the door. Not the beer — the garlic pita. He could drink enough pints to roll home à la Andy Capp, but that garlic pita . . . The rancid fug stays with us for days, all because the garlic comes from an industrial-sized bucket.
Please know I’m not afraid of garlic. I’m not that person who snaps on latex gloves before chopping or coyly declines all things garlicky for fear of inflicting the consequences on others. I’ll embrace the fattest bulbs and double the dose in recipes, because I know fresh, whole heads aren’t the culprit — it’s the ready-chopped variety that gives garlic a bad name, and the rest of us bad breath.
When real garlic is cooked, sulphur compounds (and pungency) are destroyed. And the smell of it cooking, minced and sizzling in butter, will tempt even the most reluctant garlic-lover. Les Blank, director of
the film Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers, understood this perfectly. He planted garlicfilled toaster ovens in the theatre for his premiere, allowing the pleasing scent of roasting garlic to waft over his audience.
That imposter sold by the tub reeks from the moment it’s opened, and goes against all wisdom — cut up garlic just before using because it starts oxidising immediately, and don’t store it for long for the same reason: it turns yellow and smells foul. Who knows how long the convenience kind has been festering, yet it creeps into prawn specials, lies submerged in low-grade oil at pizza chains, and hides in garlic breads frozen since the ice age.
Do we resort to this travesty in the name of convenience? It’s so easy, satisfying even, to sprinkle a peeled clove with sea salt and grind it to a smooth, pulpy paste by pressing down and smearing with the face of a knife blade. Just as easy is a rasp, like a microplane, or one of those stippled ceramic plates we buy at home expos believing they have the blessing of Provençal housewives.
Or perhaps it’s because we expect garlic to be at our disposal all year round, when actually the arrival of new garlic in spring deserves as much celebration as the first heirloom tomato in summer. And just like you’d bottle a glut of tomatoes as sauce, it’s simple enough to preserve in-season garlic as confit, cooking plump cloves in oil and refrigerating in a glass jar. In fact, after a winter of flicking green shoots out of shriveled cloves, we should rejoice in garlic’s return.
Alice Waters — founder of Chez Panisse restaurant and champion of local farm produce long before it became fashionable — dedicated entire menus to Allium
sativum at her annual garlic festival in California. There were garlic soufflés, baked fish with garlic puff pastry, garlic and goose-fat-rubbed croutons on rocket, and winespiced garlic sherbets. People flew in on Learjets and a New York Times report covering the 1979 “Garlic Frenzy” referred to garlic as the LSD of the ’70s.
I’m sure Ms Waters would rather eat her hat than use pre-crushed garlic. Specifically, the hat made of garlic she donned for this year’s screening of Blank’s documentary — complete with a garlic posy in her hands. Now that’s the kind of respect the so-called stinking rose deserves.