In Pursuit of Garlic Read Online Free PDF Page B

against it. Even when I was a little girl I’d often heard Grandma speak disdainfully of “that man across the street, the one with garlic on his breath.” It appeared he was more unworthy than the lurching fellow down the street, whose breath was often rank with beer. Their prejudice wasn’t their fault, I suppose. For long stretches of history, from the Romans to the Renaissance and for most of the twentieth century, Anglo-Saxons scorned garlic as fit only for peasants. Garlic isn’t used much by the Japanese, either, perhaps because Japan is geographically isolated and its food has traditionally been based on local products, yet it’s an essential part of other Asian cuisines—Korean, Thai, Indonesian, and Chinese. Maybe the Japanese are like the English and have an aversion to foods considered attractive to peasant stock.
    Long before the Romans invaded Britannia, their soldiers knew that garlic was good for more than keeping muscles strong. It also gave a pot of plain old turnips a boost. The soldiers passed their kitchen tricks along to Celtic cooks—sometimes men, sometimes women, for the Celts had a democratic society in which women were considered equal to men, owned property, chose their own husbands, and led battles, as Queen Boudicca did. And little by little, won over by the growing variety of other vegetables and fruits the invaders brought from their warmer Mediterranean country, the Celts learned to appreciate garlic.
    The Romans introduced many foods to Britannia during the nearly four hundred years they occupied the country. They also built roads that lasted for centuries, founded cities like London and Manchester and York, created water and sewage systems, and established linear measurement. You might say they started Britannia on the road to civilization. Their influence continues to this day (in Canada we started to phase out feet and inches in favor of metric measurement a couple of decades ago, but many of us still prefer the Roman way) and this includes their effect on the Celtic diet. The Celts were big on hunks of ox or cow speared right out of the pot with a knife, but the Romans introduced them to chicken; different kinds of game, including brown hare and pheasant; and a delicious escargot ( Helix pomatia ), called the Roman snail in Britain today. They brought herbs such as parsley, thyme, bay, and basil; fruits such as apples, mulberries, and cherries; and many vegetables, including cabbages, peas, and asparagus. And they brought garlic, as well as leeks, onions, and shallots—all members of the Allium genus. The leek was adopted so wholeheartedly that it later became the national emblem of Wales.
    Putting aside the soldiers who stank of garlic, it’s fair to say the Roman generals and bureaucrats were a pretty impressive lot. They were civilized and sophisticated, and they knew how to prepare food and eat it with ceremony. Soon the Celtic elite—for there was an elite in Britanny, made up of chieftains and tribe rulers, not to mention Druid priests—began to suffer from an ancient version of Stockholm syndrome, and within a generation or two they were emulating the ways of their invaders. They invited the Romans to fancy dinner parties, ordering fine foods and wines from around the empire to impress them. The two groups intermarried. The Celts took up the Roman practice of reclining on couches to dine and kept slaves to serve and mop up. One woman in Chester, England, was so won over by the Roman way of dining that she had a likeness of herself lounging in typical Roman fashion in her triclinium carved on her tombstone. Her guests might have been served nettle pie, roast duck in fancy sauces of dried damson plums or other fruits, swan simmered in seawater, and steamed custards of small fish. The upper classes ate dishes flavored with garum, a fermented fish sauce much like the Vietnamese nam pla we use today, and Asian spices such as ginger, pepper, cinnamon, and saffron.
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