In Pursuit of Garlic Read Online Free PDF

on those adolescent evenings when Joe and I ate spaghetti and meatballs in Luca’s restaurant and gazed hungrily into each other’s eyes. But when we were married and had our own apartment kitchen, I began to practice my newly discovered hobby: cooking. This was a new adventure with unseen boundaries. In the produce department of our local supermarket I found vegetables that Grandma had never seen, “exotic” ones like zucchini and eggplant. Even broccoli, which had been around for a few years but was generally disdained because of its cabbagelike taste, was gaining in popularity. Garlic was significantly absent. It never grew in my father’s vegetable garden so I’d never laid eyes on it and I assumed it grew in the tropics, maybe on a tree. But garlic salt and garlic powder lurked on the spice shelves. I bought some of the powder but wasn’t sure how to use it, so it languished in my kitchen cupboard until it yellowed and hardened and I threw it out, wondering if I was missing something.
    Italian eateries were sprouting up all over, and spaghetti became a staple on the tables of Anglo-Saxons like me—spaghetti with meat sauce, not the big, soft meatballs that Luca’s dad made. Even he morphed our favorite dish into spaghetti Bolognese, a North American version of a classic Italian recipe. Every restaurant served it, and every new cook and college student on a budget had his or her own version. The home versions were made with ground beef sautéed and then simmered with copious quantities of canned tomato sauce—and not much garlic or any other herb except for a pinch of dried basil. The authentic Bolognese recipe—named for Bologna, where it originated—is made with pancetta and beef, veal and/or pork (sometimes chopped, not ground), minced onion, carrot, celery, plenty of garlic, red wine, chicken stock, a bit of tomato paste, and a cup or so of milk to smooth and enrich the sauce. It’s thick, more like a meat stew than a tomato sauce, and is usually served with tagliatelle, not spaghetti, although that’s a niggly point. It’s also great with polenta.
    I’d never heard of tagliatelle when we went to Luca’s restaurant, and I doubt that it was on the menu. Spaghetti was the pasta of the day, with lasagna a close second, prepared with the ever-present meat sauce layered with lots of mozzarella cheese. I didn’t know that in Italy pasta was often served just with masses of chopped garlic, olive oil, and Parmesan cheese, the best way ever. It and many other variations, including an authentic Bolognese sauce, can be found in North American restaurants today because we’ve learned to love real Italian food and to adore garlic. People like Luca and his family got the changes rolling, and gradually the meat-and-potatoes dinner lost its place at the top of the North American meal plan, which began to include soupçons of garlic.
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    Unless very sparingly used, the flavour is disagreeable to the English palate.
    ISABELLA BEETON, Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861)
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    BOTH MOM and Grandma, who lived with us, were good cooks, but our meals always followed the meat-and-potatoes plan and seldom had strong flavors—certainly never a hint of garlic. We rubbed thyme and sage on our pork chops, doused them with HP Sauce, and considered ourselves adventurous gourmands. When I look at the label on the bottle of HP Sauce stored in my fridge, I’m surprised to see garlic on the ingredients list. Who knew?
    Garlic was never chopped into Grandma’s steak and ale pie, and slivers of garlic were never inserted in Mom’s roast beef. Funny, I’m just one step removed from that English heritage, but I can’t imagine roast beef without a couple of cloves of garlic sliced and embedded in the succulent meat.
    Mom and Grandma hadn’t been introduced to the wonderful allure of garlic, but there was more to their avoidance of the odorous bulb than a lack of opportunity. They’d inherited the Anglo-Saxon prejudice