In Pursuit of Garlic Read Online Free PDF Page A

butter and garlic. I bit into a piece, and it was heaven, the aroma at the doorway multiplied a thousand times into a taste that filled my mouth as well as my nostrils. After the first bite I didn’t care about the butter sliding down my chin. I had a second slice, and then a third. When the basket was empty, the waiter looked very pleased and brought us another, followed by big flat bowls of spaghetti glistening with tomato sauce and topped with three meatballs the size of golf balls.
    I didn’t think I’d eat the whole thing, but I did, savoring each bite of soft, garlicky meatball and letting the spaghetti and slippery sauce roll around my mouth before I swallowed it. I slurped it, too—we both did, and it was a bonding moment between us, when we both managed to put aside our self-consciousness and simply eat with gusto, no matter what we looked like.
    I’d never eaten such a heavenly meal. That evening was the first of many visits to “our” Italian restaurant, and Luca, the waiter, became almost a friend. He always greeted us with a wide smile and a basket of hot garlic bread. I thought he was psychic. How did he know we were coming? Did he have a basket ready every evening at seven in case we dropped by? We ate the same meal every time, too, partly in honor of that first evening, but mainly because we loved it so much. It was our tradition.
    I’ve often wondered what became of that restaurant, whose name I can’t remember, and of Luca and his beaming smile. The cozy, welcoming atmosphere and his dad’s Promethean cooking had a big influence on me. It was a very long time ago, but that evening was a turning point in my life. It opened up a new world of taste and provided me with one of the keenest—and the garlickiest—gastronomic experiences of my life.
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    My eyes grew heavy and I began to sink into an odd, sleepy euphoria. “Ah,” said Robert. “She is feeling the garlic effect.”
    RUTH REICHL, Comfort Me with Apples
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    I DIDN’T realize that Luca and his family were going to have an influence on more than my budding sense of taste. They were a small part of the contingent of thousands of Italians and other Europeans who immigrated to North America—and particularly to Toronto, where I lived—right after the Second World War. They brought garlic with them, but they brought other influences too: they cried and they laughed more and harder than my Anglo-Saxon family did, they had bigger families that interacted more, and they went to church a lot, grew their own vegetables, and made their own sausages and wine. They almost always created their own communities and stayed within them, even though my grandma sniffed that “those new people” didn’t know their place. She meant, of course, that their place was anywhere but our country, but since they were here they’d better learn not to upset the British status quo.
    I loved Grandma, but she was a bit of a relic, if not an outright bigot. She was an immigrant herself—she’d come to Canada from Britain as a young mother with Grandpa and my father. Despite her wacky sense of humor and lively nature, she had a disapproving side and stood firmly on guard for staid British ways. Her new country never measured up to her old one, but whenever a few “vulgar foreigners” threatened our conservative British colony, she rose to its defense as if it were Buckingham Palace under attack. Not for anything or anyone would we relinquish our refined ways, especially not for those Johnny-come-latelies who were not original settlers. This was Britain’s country.
    Grandma didn’t live to see the changes, but within a generation all of those foreigners—the Italians, the Portuguese, and the Greeks, and later Indians, Poles, Vietnamese, Chinese, and more—had started to reshape life and attitudes in many parts of the continent for the better, bringing an exciting mixture of cultures that has continued in the generations since.
    None of this was obvious to me