On Garlic, Mosquitoes, Vampires . . . and Bad Breath

Last week’s post on Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic got me thinking, not about the dish’s qualification as an easy and heart-warming post-holiday dinner (which was the point of the post), but about its claim to fame: its legendary forty cloves of garlic. More specifically, I got thinking about our contemporary love affair with garlic. Hard to imagine cooking dinner these days without mincing up at least a few cloves of garlic. But this hasn’t always been the case. Not, at least, for us English speakers.

When the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley traveled through Italy in the early 19^th century, he was horrified to learn that women—yes, even women—ate the pungent little cloves. “There are two Italies,” he wrote home; “The one is the most sublime and lovely contemplation that can be conceived by the imagination of man; the other is the most degraded, disgusting, and odious. What do you think? Young women of rank actually eat—you will never guess what–garlick!” Nothing, to Shelley, could better illustrate Italy’s degraded condition than the fact that its women ate garlic. Even Shelley,  iconoclastic romantic poet that he was, simply could not fathom kissing a young woman with garlic-scented breath. 

But then Shelley was simply echoing traditional English views voiced over a hundred years earlier by the gardener and diarist John Evelyn in his Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets:

Garlick, Allium; dry towards excess; and tho' both by Spaniards and Italians, and the more southern people, familiarly eaten, with almost everything, and esteem'd of such singular vertue to help concoction, and thought a charm against all infection and poyson  . . . We absolutely forbid it entrance into our salleting, by reason of its intolerable Rankness, and which made it so detested of old; that the eating of it was (as we read) part of the punishment for such as had committed the horrid'st crimes. To be sure, 'tis not for ladies palats. nor those who court them.

Deemed inappropriate for young ladies’ palates (or for those who court them), yet force-fed to criminals: such was the distaste in which garlic was held.

And yet, by the same token, it was also believed to be a “charm against infection and poison”—which claim, by the way, has been confirmed by modern medicine that has identified garlic’s strong smell to result from the sulfur-containing molecule that results when cloves are chopped or crushed, thereby releasing the enzyme allinaise which converts the amino acid alliin into the smelly but antibiotic and antifungal compound allicin. Thus, whether for good or for ill, it's only when garlic is chopped, crushed, or chewed that it gives off the powerful odor that makes your breath smell—and your skin and blood as well. Apparently mosquitoes find the smell unappealing and so don’t bite garlic eaters who are thus spared such mosquito-borne diseases as malaria, dengue, yellow fever, and West Nile virus.

But mosquitoes are hardly unique in their dislike of garlic Just think of vampires and their legendary aversion to it. If you want to protect yourself against the likes of Count Dracula, you’d be wise to follow Bram Stoker’s advice: rub garlic over your window sashes, door jambs, and around the fireplace “to ensure that every whiff of air that might get in would be laden with the garlic smell.” Take the further precaution of adorning yourself with a wreath of garlic flowers around your neck.

Interesting, isn't it, that despite its medicinal properties—not to mention the protection it provides against blood-suckers of all shapes and sizes—garlic was nonetheless forbidden to young ladies. Apparently it was better they die of malaria or join the ranks of the undead than suffer the indignity of halitosis, or, in plain old English, bad breath.

Two final tidbits on the subject of bad breath. First, it was another pungent allium from which garlic derives its second syllable: the leek (gar was the Old English word for spear; perhaps the long bladelike leaves of the garlic plant were thought to resemble spears)—and bad breath was associated with leeks as well. According to Isabella Beeton’s 1861 Book of Household Management, “to prevents its tainting the breath, the leek should be well boiled.” 

The second tidbit brings me full circle back to my Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic. Since it's only when they're chopped, crushed, or chewed that garlic cloves release their odiferous fumes, by cooking them whole, one can enjoy their mellow, creamy sweetness with no ill effect.

Leeks: The Unsung Heroes of the Onion Family

 

Every year for the past few years I buy the same kitchen calendar for myself (it's the Eating Well Calendar if you want to know, and you can still order one for yourself if you haven't yet committed to a calendar for 2012). It’s got such beautiful pictures of fruits and vegetables that I don’t have the heart to throw the calendars out by the time the end of December rolls around. In fact I’ve got a collection of old ones upstairs, dating back, I think, to 2004 or 2005. I suppose I have it in the back of my mind that one fine day I’ll get around to framing a few of my favorite images to decorate the walls of my kitchen. But how to decide between the apples and beets and figs and cabbages?

But now it’s March and I just turned a new page on my calendar (it’s a little game I play with myself, refusing to peek ahead of time) to find . . . an onion. Hmmm. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a really good close-up of the vegetable that is, arguably, the one we cook with most of all. A basic kitchen staple. A veritable work-horse. Old Reliable. I bet that if you’ve cooked dinner at all within the last week, an onion figured in the preparation. I couldn’t tell you if it was a yellow, white, or red one—or whether it was a Bermuda, Vidalia, Walla-Walla, Maui, or maybe a pretty little Cipollini or Pearl. But I’m willing to wager that if you cooked this week, at some point your knife made contact with an onion.

All of which is simply another way of saying something that Julia Child—aka The French Chef—once commented on far more memorably: “It’s hard to imagine civilization without onions.”

So here’s my question and here’s what made me pause when I turned the page on my calendar to discover an onion. What’s become of that other member of the allium family that I, for one, turn to time and time again during these long dark wintry months? No, not the scallion and no, not the shallot. The leek. What's become of the leek? Why haven’t I ever seen a glossy shot of a leek on my calendar? When was the last time you chopped a leek?  

There always seems to be a reason to avoid the leek. “A what?," I've heard some people say. “Looks like a scallion on steroids.” “What’s it taste like?” “They’re so dirty.” “What a pain to rinse out all the grit.” “What do I do with it?” Supermarkets even feel the need to explain what they are and sometimes post designed-to-be-helpful signs: "Mild, with an onion-like flavor."

But think of this. Time was (granted, a long long time ago) when the leek was so far from being the underdog of the onion family that other oniony vegetables were named after it. Instead of “spring onions” and “pearl onions” and “green onions,” there used to be plants called “cropleac,” “holleac,” and “bradeleac.” No one’s quite sure what the names referred to all those years ago, but the “leac” at the end makes one thing very clear: whatever they were, they were treated as a type of leek.

We’ve still got one such word with us. Garlic. Bet you didn’t know that garlic gets its second syllable—the lic—from the leek. The gar meant something like “spear,” which makes sense if you’ve ever seen a head of garlic with its stem still attached.

So why is it that today the leek is considered to be a member of the onion family whereas it used to be that the onion was considered part of the leek family? What was responsible for what the late great food writer Jane Grigson once referred to as “the social collapse of this ancient vegetable”?

Now there are all sorts of practical reasons. Onions have papery skins that allow you to store them longer, not to mention keeping out a lot of the dirt and grit. But I wonder whether there’s also something about the names. Shakespeare knew a thing or two about how to use his words and he made good sport out of the fact that “to eat a leek” meant “to humiliate.” “I will make him eat some part of my leek, or I will peat his pate four days,” declares the leek-eating Welsh Ffluellen in Henry V. 

Somehow the monosyllabic leek just doesn’t sound as musical or as appetizing as onion. Linger over the word. Say it slowly. On-yun. It flows trippingly off the tongue, doesn’t it? Just another example of something I have found to be true, if not all the time, at least most of the time. We like French-sounding words better than German-sounding ones and our linguistic preferences seem to coincide with our culinary ones. Which sounds better to you? L’oignon or der lauch? And which do you reach for more often?