"Do not eat garlic or onions,"Don Quixote advises Sancho Panza, "for their smell will reveal that you are a peasant." -Cervantes
WE ARE all peasants now. Happy peasants at that, liberated from the prejudices which, for too long, dismissed as foreign and noxious the noble bulb that is garlic. Some, however, cling on – take letter writer Aiden Desmond only two weeks ago in a diatribe against our food writer and cook Domini Kemp: “The recipes offered for her ideal Christmas meal feature one particular ingredient in wholesale abundance, garlic. To recap: soup, four cloves; goose, whole head of garlic; bacon, six cloves; gratin, four cloves; stuffing, three cloves. A delightful 17 cloves and one full head of garlic.” To which we must respond, “And why not? Four cheers!”
In cooking the herb has a vital role. "Garlic used as it should be used is the soul, the divine essence, of cookery," as Mrs WG Waters wrote in her classic on Italian food, The Cook's Decameron(1920). "The cook who can employ it successfully will be found to possess the delicacy of perception, the accuracy of judgment, and the dexterity of hand which go to the formation of a great artist."
A chastened Kemp – more's the pity – now confesses that "I am rather too fond of garlic, but my love of it has as much to do with its anti-inflammatory and immune boosting properties, as its delicious flavour." Indeed the long history of allium sativum, cited in the Bible and Talmud, by Hippocrates, Galen, and Pliny the Elder, associates it with alleviating conditions such as parasites, respiratory problems, poor digestion and low energy. In India it was seen as an aphrodisiac – widows, adolescents, those who had taken a vow, or were fasting could not eat garlic because of its stimulant quality. Many share the misapprehension that Ireland only discovered garlic in the past 20 years, or as a correspondent put it, when we moved on from "the days of my youth when olive oil had to be bought from a pharmacy and garlic was regarded as some kind of outrageous foreign affectation". Not so. It was a rediscovery. The literature of the period from 800 to 1160 mentions wild garlic, or creamh, which was used in many dishes and as a vegetable. And some of the commonest archaeological finds from that time are barrels of ancient garlic butter, buried in peat bogs in wooden firkins. The longer it was left, the more delicious it became.
Go for it, Kemp. Don’t skimp on the “stinking rose”.