Conscious Choice: Garlic Forever

March 2001 | Cooking with the Seasons

Garlic Forever

by Terra Brockman

In the spring, cherry blossoms, in the summer the cuckoo.

In autumn the moon, and in winter the snow, clear, cold.

— the Zen priest Dogen (1200-1253)

But in all seasons, and in between, garlic! Because garlic bulbs keep well, they are often thought of as a bulb with no season. But like everything in this world, they have their peak times. If you bought a garlic braid last fall, now is the time to take it off the wall and use it up before the cloves dry and shrivel. Especially now, in the lingering days of late winter, the warming, comforting aroma of cooking garlic is a special treat. Before you know it, the new green garlic will be available at farmers’ markets, so use the old bulbs now to enliven everything from pasta to soup.

Garlic Roots

Botanists believe that garlic was one of the first plants to be domesticated. The remains of ancient garlic have been found in caves inhabited 10,000 years ago. It is certainly easy to imagine someone gathering wild garlic and then planting a few cloves in the ground near her shelter.

Not a lot has changed in that regard over the last 10,000 years. When my brother harvests his garlic in late summer, he saves back the best heads to use as seed. In late fall, we dismember the heads and plant the individual cloves — about 10,000 of them — in the newly barren fields. Each clove begins to send roots down and then shoots up in the fall. We cover them with a thick straw mulch to keep them warm and protected over the winter. Then, right around now, the first warm spring days shake them out of dormancy and they begin growing like mad, shooting their thin green spears above the golden straw.

Most of my sources agree that garlic originated in south-central Asia. From there it quickly spread along "the garlic crescent" — all across Asia and west around the Mediterranean. And from there it hopped, skipped, and jumped to the New World with various colonial expeditions. Now some 200 varieties of garlic are grown around the world.

Curative Powers

Much has been written about the healing powers of garlic. In writings from early civilizations all around the Mediterranean, we learn that garlic was not only a food, but also a medicine and a preservative. The first garlic prescription was inscribed in cuneiform on a Sumerian clay tablet. Clay models of garlic heads were crafted in Egypt more than 5,000 years ago and garlic heads (six heads, to be precise) were placed in tombs, including Tutankhamen’s.

The wisdom of the ancients was confirmed in modern times when the microbiologist Louis Pasteur put a few cloves of garlic into a petri dish full of bacteria. When he looked at it a few days later, he found a clear zone of killed bacteria around each clove. Both before and after that discovery, garlic preparations have been used to disinfect wounds and to treat illnesses from cholera to cancer.

Word Roots

If you go back to the Anglo-Saxon roots of the word garlic, you come up with gar-leac. Leac was the term for any plant of the Allium genus.

Onions were ynne-leac and leeks pot-leac. Gar meant "spear" and referred to the spearhead shape of the cloves. ("Clove," by the way, comes from the Old English clufu, from which the modern word cleave derives. When you cleave the garlic head you get cloves.

And while we’re doing etymology, let’s turn to confit, which is derived from the French verb confire, to preserve. Confit most often refers to small pieces of meat cooked in their own fat and then stored in a pot covered with fat. But there are also vegetable confits. I have heard of a number of ways to make garlic confit, but this is the simplest and the one that best preserves the garlic flavor. It is from Patricia Wells’s Bistro Cooking.

Garlic Confit

1 cup of garlic cloves, peeled
1 cup extra virgin olive oil

1. Put the garlic cloves and olive oil in a small saucepan, adding more oil if necessary to cover the cloves.

2. Bring to a slow simmer and cook over medium-low heat until the garlic is tender, about twenty minutes.

3. You may serve immediately, alongside seafood, potatoes, rice, or vegetables, or you may store it for future use.

4. To store, allow the mixture to cool and transfer to a jar, topping with more oil if necessary. Refrigerate.

5. The cloves are wonderful in soups, stews, and omelets. The oil can be spooned off and used to flavor vinaigrettes.

This is also the perfect time of year to match potatoes with garlic. As they cook, they warm your soul and your senses, making the whole house fragrant with rich aromas.

Sautéed Potatoes with Garlic and Walnut Oil

1 pound firm potatoes
2 Tablespoons walnut oil (or olive oil)
Salt and pepper to taste
3-4 cloves minced garlic
2 Tablespoons parsley, minced
2 Tablespoons chives, minced

1. Scrub and thinly slice the potatoes. Wrap in cloth or paper towels to absorb any excess liquid.

2. Heat the oil in a large skillet until hot but not smoking. Add the potatoes. Season with salt and pepper. Sauté until the potatoes are cooked and lightly brown on both sides — about fifteen to twenty minutes, depending on the thickness of your potato slices.

3. Remove from the heat. Sprinkle the garlic, parsley, and chives over the potatoes and toss to blend. Serve.

Garlic Soup Without Fear or Favor

A year or so ago, the New York Times ran a long article on the many varieties of garlic and what the big-time chefs are doing with them. I adapted this next recipe from the Jean-Georges Vongerichten recipe in that article. It is delicious and will also cure whatever may ail you, combining the time-honored health benefits of both chicken soup and garlic.

Garlic Soup

(Adapted from Jean-Georges Vongerichter)

3 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
4 whole garlic bulbs, separated into cloves, peeled and thinly sliced
2 teaspoons fresh thyme leaves
6 cups chicken stock, preferably homemade
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
2 large eggs
1 Tablespoon white wine vinegar

1. Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan over medium heat.

2. Add the garlic and thyme. Sauté until garlic is soft and translucent, about five minutes.

3. Add chicken stock, and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat to medium, and simmer until the liquid is reduced and the garlic is very tender, about fifteen minutes. Season with salt and pepper.

4. In another small bowl, combine eggs and vinegar. Beat with a fork until well-blended. Whisk into soup and stir until soup has thickened. Serve hot.

For True Garlic Fanatics

This recipe comes from Lisa Comforty, whose husband, before he was her husband, wooed her with garlic. Or rather, the idea of garlic. According to Lisa, it went like this: "’Here’s a thought,’ he told me, one day early on in our relationship.‘Baked garlic, stuffed with garlic, topped with garlic sauce, sprinkled with garlic and eaten with garlic bread.’" So when his birthday came around, Lisa surprised him with the idea of garlic, fully implemented.

She reports that when she served Baked Garlic, Stuffed with Garlic, Topped with Garlic Sauce, Sprinkled with Garlic, Served with Garlic Bread, you could’ve heard the sound of one hand clapping. Which is to say, the birthday guests were stunned into silence and happily fell to munching. Now you too can wow your beloved, or loved ones, or just yourself with the ultimate garlic delight.

Baked Garlic, Stuffed with
Garlic, Topped with Garlic Sauce, Sprinkled with Garlic, Served with Garlic Bread

6 heads of garlic
12 cloves of garlic
1/2 cup bread crumbs
1 Tablespoon minced parsley
1 Tablespoon butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 Tablespoons mayonnaise
4 Tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon minced garlic
1 baguette
2-3 Tablespoons butter
1-2 teaspoons minced garlic

1. Place the six heads of garlic in a small baking dish. Take another dozen cloves, and mash them with the bread crumbs, parsley, butter; and salt. As best you can, stuff this mixture in between the cloves of the six heads. Cover the baking dish with tin foil. Bake at 325 degrees F. for about thirty minutes or until the cloves can be easily pierced with a toothpick.

2. While the heads are baking, either go to all the trouble of making aioli (homemade mayonnaise-garlic-lemon sauce) or do it the fast way by mixing prepared mayonnaise, lemon juice, and minced garlic.

3. Also in the meantime, prepare the garlic bread by getting a baguette or other good, crusty, long loaf; cutting it in half lengthwise, and slathering it with butter. Sprinkle the buttered sides with the minced garlic and warm it in the oven.

4. When the baked garlic is done, spoon the garlic mayonnaise over the heads and serve with the garlic bread.

Terra Brockman is the director of The Land Connection Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving farmland and promoting small-scale, diversified, organic agriculture in Illinois. Visit www.thelandconnection.org or call 309-965-2407 to learn how to get involved.

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