Posted on 03/17/2012 10:33:40 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Author explores the global goodness of nature’s beloved clove
The outrageous success of Twilight in recent years has resulted in authors pitching every kind of vampire-riffing book they can think of, from teen romance to paranormal thrillers. Liz Primeau went another way: She wrote a book about garlic.
The bulb went off, so to speak, for Primeau in 2009 — but not because of garlic’s folkloric ability to repel vampires.
“China dumped on us, flooding the market with cheap low-quality garlic and undercutting local agriculture,” the author recalls. “When I read that, that was sort of the finishing touch. I’ve been eating garlic for years and it just suddenly appeared to me that there was a book to be written. And that there was so much more to it than just a cookbook.”
Instead, Primeau’s well-researched ode joins a growing category of single-ingredient books that explore humble staples — not as exhaustive as Mark Kurlansky’s Salt or Elizabeth Abbott’s Sugar, but more like Potato, Andrew Smith’s global history of the spud, or Tom Mueller’s Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil. If these explorations sometimes read like spy thrillers, that’s because there’s a lot of lore to cover, especially for garlic.
“I also realized that garlic was undergoing this renaissance,” Primeau, the founding editor of Canadian Gardening, continues, “and the Chinese garlic thing was a turning point because that’s all we can get.”
She set about researching and tracing what garlic has meant to different cultures, and also searching out and tasting the many different varieties. For example, a delectable rare rose-coloured version in Ojai, Calif., inspired Primeau to traipse to a full-blown garlic festival in Lautrec, France, where she consumed the pungent bulb in enviable quantities.
“One of the things that struck me,” she says, “is that all these different civilizations living in different parts of the world with no Internet, no cellphone to connect, all used garlic for the same things — for diarrhea, to treat funguses, as an antibiotic.”
A perfect illustration of this would be the wonderful scene in John Sayles’ 1987 film Matewan, in which striking coal miners in a West Virginia town have set up a tent city, and the locals uneasily share makeshift living quarters with the Italian scab workers. In a simple moment, one local wife hands her Italian counterpart a gnarled stalk that grows wild in the forest of Appalachia, a culinary peace offering to help flavour her evening meal. The Italian doesn’t speak a word of English but accepts the precious cargo, inhales it and murmurs in wonder, “E aglio!” — it’s garlic.
“It is a pillar of so many cultures, except for Northern Europe and particularly British culture,” says Primeau, who herself has that ancestry and in one memorable moment in the book recalls the first date on which she smelled, then tasted, garlic for the first time, at an Italian restaurant. “For so many cultures garlic is a staple,” she says, but many of us have had that same experience — my own grandmother in Manchester wouldn’t touch the stuff even with the tip of a fork.
Of course the edible is political, and while Garlic isn’t exactly a call to arms, you can’t help but feel a little riled up after reading it.
“That shocked me, that we were buying so much of our vegetables from China,” Primeau admits. “Like everyone else I have just become more aware — it’s part of the general consciousness now.”
Preimeau tried unsuccessfully to get hold of Galen Weston at Loblaws “to ask about why they don’t stock local garlic,” she says, “because they are always doing commercials about local sourcing, but I could never find anything but Chinese garlic in their stores.
“They should be buying more local.”
This recent general interest in the food chain is fuelled in part by the new urban agriculture movement, “the people who sort of glamorize vegetables,” says the seasoned ornamental gardener.
“But there’s good fallout from that because I think they make growers — and even I think grocery chains — more aware of the need to stock local garlic, local tomatoes. Not even at my local greengrocers will they sell wonderful local tomatoes that are picked ripe.”
Should the book inspire you to be more choosy in the produce department, Primeau offers a helpful guide to identifying different varieties of garlic (Argentinian and Mexican are better than Chinese, for example) and instructions for cultivating it in your own backyard, which is easy in most parts of Canada.
“To grow well, garlic needs a winter cold period, like a tulip does,” Primeau explains, adding that she stores the harvested bulbs in the coldest place in her house: the bedroom clothes closet.
While the new tome isn’t a cookbook, the author did sprinkle a few recipes among the chapters on garlic’s historical information and medicinal applications.
“Because that’s what we do with garlic — we eat it,” she says with a laugh.
Garlic by Liz Primeau is available March 16 from Greystone Books ($19.95).
Most of the Ozarks region of Missouri is an uplifted ocean bottom, with layers of limestone and mudstones with very little soil. Most of our area escaped glaciation, so the only soil to be had is scooped up from river bottoms and trucked in. This is what we’re using in raised bed gardens.
I have a good produce store near me which stocks California garlic. I will NOT buy food from China.
I don’t care for “elephant garlic”. I can’t put my finger on why exactly but I have two friends who are chefs and they do what they can to avoid their garlic.
Same with Mexican avocados. They are too watery.
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