Garlic Passion

You’ll never guess who I cooked with today! Aunt Dinah. Well, she’s not really my aunt. She’s Granny’s friend. My grandmother has the coolest friends. Aunt Dinah was an actress famous for her scream back in Hollywood’s B-movie era. She’s amazing. She grows vegetables and herbs in her backyard and cooks them. She’d invited me over for a garlic lesson, and I jumped at the chance.

That’s right. Garlic. I’ll tell you, just like Aunt Dinah told me. There’s more to the stinking rose than meets the nose. I swear, she’s a riot. I’d never heard garlic called the stinking rose, but apparently that’s an old name for the odorous cousin of the onion.

She knows everything there is to know about garlic. My knowledge of it was pretty much limited to buying it at the supermarket. I use it a lot because I like food that’s been kicked up a notch, if you know what I mean.

I’d never seen a head of garlic outside a grocery store so to see it growing in Aunt Dinah’s back yard among the roses was a surprise. A stinking rose with perfumed red roses.

I guess they call it stinking rose because of the shape of the bulb or head with its tightly packed segments called cloves. It does kind of resemble the tight-pedaled structure of a rose. The bloom at the top of the tall stalk is ball-shaped and made of dozens of tiny spines. I’m sure you understand the stinky reference.

Aunt Dinah said gardeners of her generation always did companion planting of garlic and roses because garlic provided organic pest prevention.

The afternoon in the kitchen was the most fun I’ve had since I last went to an olive oil tasting with my friend Brian.

Garlic has been around forever. You can eat the leaves and stems when the plant’s young, but most people just eat the cloves that make up the head. And that’s the only thing I’ve ever seen sold in stores.

Funny thing is, unlike most plants, botanists don’t really know the exact ancestry of garlic. Apparently, the cultivars, that means varieties, are sterile so it’s hard to trace our cultivated garlic back through history to determine the exact wild species of plant from which it came.

She even knew about wild varieties called crow garlic and field garlic. She could even rattle off the scientific names which I won’t even try to pronounce. My tongue just doesn’t twist itself easily around Latin names.

Fortunately, I held up my end of the cooking conversation because I knew that the flavor of garlic depends on how it’s used. Chopped raw in a salad dressing or salsa, and the flavor is intense. So is the after-smell. Some people are bothered more than others by this. So if you plan on kissing someone after eating garlic, make sure the “kissee” has had garlic too.

Cooked, the taste is mellow. Roast a head of garlic, and the cloves become a luscious, almost-sweet paste that transforms a slice of bread into a little bit of heaven.

Like olive oil, my other favorite ingredient, garlic historically was a food and a medicine. Like many ancient medicines, it really does have health benefits.

Garlic has a religious link too. Ancient Egyptians thought it was a deity. Early Christians thought it had sprung from the left footprint of Satan in the Garden of Eden after he tempted Adam and Eve. That story and its use in folk medicine must have caused central Europeans, centuries later, to think it held supernatural power against vampires, werewolves, and other evil.

The vamp link is how Aunt Dinah got interested. She appeared as a vampire victim in a movie, and the garlic garland she piqued her curiosity. With no Internet in those days, she had to look it up in an encyclopedia at the library.

Thank goodness for technology. When I got home, I went to the Net immediately and read all about the stinking rose. I just finished ordering some from an online store.

“Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah,” I sang, smiling at the words of the old folk song.

Aunt Dinah promised that next time she’d tell me about the time she was making a Tarzan movie, and Cheetah, the Tarzan chimpanzee, drank her bottle of garlic salad dressing and grossed everyone out for days with his bad breath. Ah, yes. The golden age of movies.

I can hardly wait for my order to arrive!