Food for thought
Healing powers
Simon Courtauld
remember once being offered pickled garlic at a party in Tehran. It would give me protection, my host said, from the cholera epidemic that was sweeping through north-eastern Iran and expected to reach the capital within a few days. It was a light-hearted remark, but he may not have been entirely joking. For the healing pow- ers attributed to garlic among different civilisations seem to be almost limitless. It has been said to cure asthma and bronchi- tis, epilepsy and rheumatism; it keeps blood pressure down and is a powerful remedy against the vapours: it has been used to treat snake bites, expel worms (ver- mifuge) and repel insects. Aristophanes informed us that athletes would eat garlic before going to the stadium (today they take steroids), and the men who built the pyramids apparently were given garlic to keep them fit for their labours.
In 16th-century France doctors would carry cloves of garlic in their pockets to protect them and their patients from the bad air and the diseases around them. Later, in Marseilles, it was thought to be effective in warding off the plague; and during the first world war garlic juice was used in the British army as an antiseptic when treating wounds.
It may have been highly prized for its medicinal properties, but for centuries it had a poor reputation in English cooking. Not only did people recoil from the odour of garlic, but it it was generally considered to be vulgar as well as foul-smelling. Hot- spur, in King Henry IV, Part I, expressing his horror at the prospect of having to lis- ten to a notorious bore, said he would 'rather live/With cheese and garlic in a windmill' — a fate which today might be thought rather desirable. Garlic did not become accepted at the English table until well after the second world war. Constance Spry records her excitement when, in the 1930s at a dinner party in the United States, she was offered hot bread which had been spread with garlic-flavoured but- ter. She goes on, as if they had just done something forbidden, to describe how the guests 'repaired afterwards to bathrooms . . . and dealt faithfully with a few mouth- washes, though no one seemed inhibited or worried'.
Many of my generation were told that, if you think you like garlic, go to Paris and travel on the metro and you will get an idea of how it smells on your breath. In response to this injunction the best advice to lovers of garlic is probably to avoid trav- elling on the Paris metro. Garlic is almost universally used now in this country, and those who are worried about the sweetness of their breath should keep handy some parsley leaves or lemon rind. (On the other hand, my son would eat wild garlic from the woods at his school in Dorset to oblit- erate the smell of cigarette smoke.) At a friend's house in Majorca, gazpacho was always prepared without garlic, which seemed odd though still quite enjoyable. But there arc certain things — (doh, bour- ride — which have no meaning without gar- lic. (Aict/i, I assume, derives from the French for garlic, ail, and the fact that gar- lic, onions and leeks are all of the anon family. Italians call garlic aglio, the Spanish ajo. Why, then, do the Germans have to call it Knoblauch?) Garlic soup, requiring its essential ingredient to be sauted and crushed, is delicious with water or stock and a little olive oil poured over bread and, for a treat, poached eggs.
Garlic loses some of its pungency when it has been cooked for a while. A few cloves gently heated in olive oil for about an hour, then added with the oil to mashed potato, are not overpowering. When harvested in the summer months, sometimes with a green skin, garlic will be milder and sweet- er than the dry bulbs available in winter. Although this young garlic is particularly recommended for roasting, in large quanti- ties, round a chicken, I am confident that any cloves would improve the flavour of the roast turkey which some of us will be obliged to eat on Christmas Day. Garlic is easy to grow: planted now, it will require very little attention and be ready next summer. (Spring planting ts unlikely to be so successful, but the best information can be obtained from the Gar- lic Farm on the Isle of Wight, at Mersley Farm, Newchurch; it can also be found at farmers' markets in London.) If you have peach trees, garlic grown nearby is said to protect them from leaf curl — which may be nothing more than an old wives' tale. But, if garlic has all those medicinal power5 over humans, why not over plants too?
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