Chapter 3 — A History Told in Cloves

"If any person at any time with an impious hand has broken his aged father's neck, let him eat garlic, more baneful than hemlock. Oh! the hardy bowels of the mowers!" — Horace, Epode III (trans. Christopher Smart, rev. Theodore A. Buckley), c. 30 BC

N o plant has been loved and reviled in such equal measure, and for so long, as the one this volume praises. For four thousand years garlic has been at once medicine and menace, the labourer's ration and the aristocrat's disgrace, a charm nailed above the door and an insult flung across a border. To follow it through history is to watch a single bulb pass from hand to hand down the centuries and pick up, at each pair of hands, the prejudices of whoever held it. The story is not tidy, and the temptation to tidy it — to pretend the record is firmer than it is, or that garlic's rise was a steady march from obscurity to Michelin stars — must be resisted at every step. What follows is a history told in cloves: partial, argued-over, and all the better for being honest about its gaps.

The Roads Out of the Mountains

Garlic reached the ancient world already old. Its wild ancestor grows in the foothills of the Tien Shan in Central Asia, and from that single mountain homeland the cultivated bulb travelled outward along the earliest trade roads until it had colonised the kitchens of three continents. It was flourishing in Mesopotamia four thousand years ago and more: among the very oldest written recipes on earth — three cuneiform tablets in the Yale Babylonian Collection, composed in Akkadian around 1750 BC and deciphered in the 1980s by the French Assyriologist Jean Bottéro — is a lamb stew seasoned, in a list any modern cook would recognise at once, with "onion, samidu, coriander, leek and garlic." The world's first cookbooks already leaned on the bulb.

From that centre garlic spread in both directions at once, propagated as it still is by the planting of cloves rather than the sowing of seed. Westward it moved into Egypt, Greece and Rome, the journey this chapter is about to follow. Eastward it went more dramatically still, for garlic was not native to China. By the traditional account it arrived only in the second century BC, when the Han envoy Zhang Qian came home from his embassy to the Ferghana valley — the mission that opened the Silk Road — carrying the crops of the western lands, garlic among them. The Chinese marked its foreign birth in its very name, calling it hu suan, the garlic of the Hu, the western barbarians, to set the big imported bulb apart from the small native allium already in the fields. That a plant from one mountainside should end as the defining aromatic of both a Provençal aïoli and a Sichuan stir-fry is the largest single fact in garlic's history, and it was already half-accomplished two thousand years ago.

The Bulb of the Nile

It is in Egypt that garlic first steps clearly into the full light of documented history, and it does so wearing two faces at once — as physic and as fuel.

The medical face is the better attested. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical compilation copied around 1550 BC and among the oldest surviving pharmacopoeias on earth, prescribes garlic in some twenty-two preparations, for complaints ranging from the heart to the bite of an insect. Garlic was among the plants the embalmers and physicians of the Nile trusted, and its presence in the tombs bears this out: cloves and carved models of garlic bulbs have been recovered from Egyptian burials, including, famously, the tomb of Tutankhamun. A people that sent garlic with its dead into eternity did not think it a trifle.

The fuel face is more famous and far shakier, and it is worth being careful here, because it is the point at which garlic's history most often slides from record into legend. The tradition that the builders of the pyramids were fed garlic to give them strength rests, at bottom, on a single sentence written two thousand years after the pyramids were raised, by a Greek traveller repeating what a guide told him. That sentence is the subject of this chapter's Field Note, and the honest verdict is that it tells us a good deal about garlic's reputation in the fifth century BC and very little about who actually ate what at Giza. What can be said soberly is this: garlic was cheap, it kept, it was believed to confer endurance, and it was eaten in quantity by the working people of the ancient Mediterranean.[^1] Whether or not a single pyramid-hauler ever chewed a clove for strength, the association of garlic with hard labour and hard bodies was fixed early, and it would shadow the plant for the next three thousand years.

The most moving witness to that association is not Egyptian at all but Hebrew, and it records not the eating of garlic but the mourning of it. In the Book of Numbers, the Israelites wandering the wilderness after their flight from Egypt turn on their manna and weep for the plenty they left behind: "We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick." It is a small, extraordinary detail. A people who have just escaped slavery, and who will be a byword for the rejection of Egypt, still break down at the memory of its garlic. Whatever else bondage on the Nile had meant, it had meant garlic in the ration, and freedom in the desert did not. The bulb was the food of the enslaved and the labouring precisely because it was cheap, filling and everywhere — and it was loved for exactly the same reasons, hard enough to be wept for by those who had every reason to want Egypt forgotten.

There was nothing sentimental, either, about garlic's place in that economy: it was, quite literally, wages. The Egyptian state paid its labouring gangs not in coin, which did not yet exist, but in food — grain and bread and jars of beer, with onions, leeks and garlic to give them savour — so that a day's hard work was reckoned and settled in calories and flavour. Garlic was money a man could eat, the small dependable currency of the working body; and a people long accustomed to being paid in it would carry the taste of it, and the craving, wherever they were afterwards driven.

Strength-Food and the Food of the Poor

When garlic crossed into Greece and Rome, it carried that reputation with it, and there it acquired the double character it has never quite shed: the food that makes a body strong and the food that marks a body common. The comedies of Aristophanes, staged in fifth-century Athens, treat the bulb as the very fuel of pugnacity. Gamecocks were dosed with garlic before they were loosed at one another in the pit, on the folk-theory that a bird crammed with the stuff would fight the harder; and when Aristophanes wants an image for a man screwing himself up to a brawl, he has him bolt garlic exactly as one primes a fighting cock. Soldiers embarking for war carried it in their kit beside onions and a skin of rough wine. Athletes ate it; labourers ate it; and precisely because labourers ate it, the respectable were careful to be seen not to. Those who reeked of garlic were, in some accounts, turned away from the temples of the goddess Cybele — the smell of the field being no fit offering for the altar. The line between the strong and the coarse ran straight through the middle of a clove.

Rome inherited the whole tangle and made it sharper. Garlic was dedicated to Mars, the god of war, and issued to soldiers and rural workers as a matter of course; the elder Pliny, in the twentieth book of his Natural History, opens his chapter on the plant with the flat declaration that "garlic has very powerful properties" and then lists some sixty-one medicinal uses, from snakebite to asthma to the restoration of a labourer's ruddy colour. This is garlic taken entirely seriously, as a pillar of the household medicine chest. Roman poetry set the bulb in the same rough hands. In Virgil's second Eclogue the farm-girl Thestylis pounds garlic and wild thyme into a restorative for the reapers laid flat by the ferocious noon heat; and a whole minor poem of the Virgilian tradition, the Moretum, follows a peasant at first light as he crushes garlic, cheese, salt and herbs into a green paste for his bread, his eyes streaming at the fumes as he works. This is the world Horace's disgust takes for granted — garlic is what the sunburnt mower and the smallholder eat — which is exactly why the poet can turn it into a curse when he meets the stuff at the table of his patron Maecenas. Served a dish so freighted with garlic that he devoted an entire epode to cursing it, Horace wrote that to eat it is a punishment fit for a man who has strangled his own father; that it is "more baneful than hemlock"; and his cry of mock-agony, "Oh! the hardy bowels of the mowers!", says everything about who was expected to stomach the stuff. A gentleman at a fashionable dinner was entitled to be appalled to find on his plate the ration of the reaper.

Rome did more than eat garlic; it planted the habit across a continent. The legions carried cloves in their rations as a food of strength and of Mars's own courage, and where the army built its roads and camps from Iberia to the Rhine the bulb went with it, naturalising in the kitchen-gardens of every province it conquered — so that a great part of the garlic-growing map of modern Europe is, at bottom, a map of the Roman advance.

And yet the same centuries that sneered also codified garlic's dignity as medicine, and it was a physician who gave the plant its most lasting title. Galen of Pergamon, the most influential medical authority the ancient world produced, called garlic theriaca rusticorum — the countryman's treacle, the rustic's cure-all. The phrase is doing quiet, clever work. Theriac was the name of the fabulously elaborate and costly compound antidote that emperors swallowed against poison, a confection of dozens of ingredients that only the rich could dream of. To name the labourer's penny bulb the countryman's theriac was to grant it, half-affectionately, the same office among the poor that the imperial electuary held among the great: beneath the notice of the physician's richest patients, and yet, in its cheap way, a medicine for everything. The title stuck for a millennium and more. Gerard's Herball of 1597 still repeated it word for word — "Galen nameth it Theriaca Rusticorum, or the husbandman's Treacle" — and Gerard listed "Poor Man's Treacle" among the plain English names of the plant, treacle being nothing but the worn-down English descendant of the Greek theriake. For fifteen hundred years, in other words, the very word for garlic in an English mouth carried the memory of a Greek doctor's joke about the medicine of the poor.

The Stinking Rose

By the Middle Ages the plant had earned the nickname that has clung to it ever since, a small masterpiece of backhanded affection: the stinking rose. The phrase captures the exact ambivalence of garlic's standing. A rose it was — beautiful in its usefulness, indispensable in the pot, honoured in the herbal — but a stinking one, never to be confused with the flowers a lady might actually wear. Medieval Europe cooked with garlic at every level of society, yet the higher one climbed, the more apologetic the cooking became. Chaucer, drawing his coarse and pimpled Summoner in the Canterbury Tales, needed only to note the man's love of garlic, onions and leeks, and his readers understood the whole character at a glance: this was a creature of low appetites, and his breath announced it.

The stigma deepened as European cooking split along a fault line that would run for centuries. In the refined kitchens of France and, above all, of England, garlic came to be treated as something between an embarrassment and a threat — the mark of the peasant, the southerner, the foreigner who had not learned restraint. A cook might rub a bowl with a cut clove and throw it away; to leave garlic frankly present on the plate was to declare oneself provincial. Meanwhile, across the Mediterranean and southward into Africa and Asia, garlic remained exactly what it had always been: a foundation, used with confidence and without apology by people who found the northern squeamishness baffling. The plant had not changed. Only the company judging it had. And beneath the genteel disdain the old medicine went quietly on: the same herbals that a fashionable diner would never admit to reading still sold garlic as poor man's treacle against the plague, the worm and the cold, so that the bulb the drawing-room scorned was the very one the sickroom reached for.

The herbals kept that old faith alight for centuries, and in their pages garlic never lost its martial character: Nicholas Culpeper, cataloguing the English simples in 1653, set the bulb under the planet Mars, the very war-god the Romans had dedicated it to fifteen hundred years before. And the faith in garlic as medicine was not, as it happens, pure superstition — though the proof would be a thousand years in coming. In 2015 an Anglo-Saxon scholar at Nottingham, Christina Lee, reconstructed an eye-salve from Bald's Leechbook, a tenth-century English medical text, which called for garlic and another allium pounded with wine and oxgall and left to stand nine nights in a vessel of brass. Made up to the letter and set against bacteria in a modern microbiology laboratory, the thousand-year-old recipe did something no one had expected: it killed the hospital superbug MRSA, in some trials better than nine hundred cells in every thousand, where single-compound antibiotics falter. The honest lesson, underlined by the follow-up work, is narrower than the headlines that greeted it — it was the whole combination that worked, not the garlic alone, and a dish in a laboratory is a long way from a cure, the real evidence for garlic's medicine being the sober business of a later chapter. But the medieval herbalist who sold the stinking rose as a healer was not simply peddling magic. Sometimes, in ways he could not have begun to explain, the poor man's treacle worked.

The Garlic-Eater

There is a crueller chapter in this story, and it must be told plainly, because garlic's history is also a small history of prejudice: again and again, the bulb has been made the badge of a people, and contempt for the food a licence for contempt of the eater. The pattern is far older than the modern era. In the Roman world it was the Jews who were the garlic-eaters, and the identification cut both ways. From within, garlic was cherished: the Talmud preserves an ordinance attributed to Ezra that garlic be eaten on the eve of the Sabbath — its frank reasoning that the bulb was thought to quicken desire, and the Sabbath night the appointed time for husband and wife — and the sages set down a whole catalogue of its virtues: that it satisfies and warms the body, brightens the face, increases fertility and kills the parasites of the gut, some adding that it instils love and drives out jealousy. A dish heavy with garlic was, to them, a mark of the good table, not the poor one. From without, that very devotion became a slur. So firmly were Jews associated with the plant that "garlic-eaters" served as a plain shorthand for them — the Mishnah can gloss a certain vow as meaning, simply, Jews — and the epithet would be handed down through European caricature for the better part of two thousand years, the smell of a people's dinner standing in for everything a hostile majority wished to despise about them.

Eighteen centuries later the same insult was lifted, almost unaltered, and repointed at a new set of newcomers. When southern Italians, Greeks, and other garlic-loving peoples arrived in large numbers in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century, they brought their cooking with them, and the native-born well-to-do recoiled exactly as Rome had. Garlic became a slur before it became a fashion. It was sneered at as "Bronx vanilla," the seasoning of the immigrant tenement; "garlic-eater" served as a ready insult against Italians in particular, and the very smell of a stranger's dinner could stand in for everything the respectable classes feared about the strangers in their cities. To despise the food was a socially acceptable way to despise the people. The bulb, which had begun as the marker of the peasant, ended the nineteenth century where it had been in Nero's Rome — the marker of the outsider — the same old contempt, merely given a fresh set of targets.

And then, within a single lifetime, the whole edifice of disdain collapsed. The rehabilitation of garlic in the English-speaking world is one of the quieter revolutions in the history of taste, and it was led, not by chefs at first, but by writers who had eaten better abroad and refused to come home to boiled mutton. In Britain the decisive figure was Elizabeth David, whose A Book of Mediterranean Food, published in the grey austerity of 1950, called without embarrassment for garlic, olive oil, aubergines and basil at a moment when such things were barely to be found in an English shop. She wrote of them not as daring novelties but as the ordinary furniture of a civilised kitchen, and a generation of readers, hungry for sunlight, believed her. What had been the ploughman's shame became the gourmet's pleasure. In California the current ran faster and louder. In 1974 a young Berkeley writer, L. John Harris, who had waited tables in the first chaotic year of Alice Waters's Chez Panisse, published The Book of Garlic, reached back to the old Roman epithet and made "the stinking rose" a banner rather than an insult, and founded a half-serious international fan club, the Lovers of the Stinking Rose. From 1976 his enthusiasm helped launch the Bastille Day garlic dinners at Chez Panisse, where celebrants worked their way through whole heads of garlic baked soft in olive oil; the filmmaker Les Blank caught the movement in his 1980 documentary Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers; and by 1979 the little Californian town of Gilroy, self-declared garlic capital of the world, had thrown the first of the festivals that now draw crowds in their tens of thousands. Within thirty years the very ingredient that had been a term of racial abuse had become a thing that respectable people queued up to celebrate in public. The stinking rose had been promoted, at last, to simply the rose.

Field Note — The Inscription That May Never Have Existed

The single most repeated "fact" about garlic in the ancient world is that the labourers who built the Great Pyramid were fed radishes, onions and garlic, and that the cost was recorded on the monument itself. The claim is worth holding up to the light, slowly, because it is a near-perfect specimen of how a history hardens around a story it cannot quite support.

The source is Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC — some two thousand years after the pyramid was raised. He reports that "on the pyramid it is declared in Egyptian writing how much was spent on radishes and onions and garlic for the workmen," and that his interpreter, reading the inscription aloud to him, gave the figure as sixteen hundred talents of silver. Note first that even Herodotus hedges: he can vouch only for what the interpreter said the writing said, and adds the careful qualifier "if I rightly remember." Note second that the Greek word he uses for the third vegetable is skoroda, plainly garlic, though older English translators sometimes soften it to leeks. And note third, and most damaging, that no such inscription has ever been found, that no Egyptian monument is known to have recorded grocery bills in this manner, and that in Herodotus's day the old hieroglyphs could no longer be reliably read — so that whatever the guide claimed to be translating, he was almost certainly inventing, whether to impress a credulous tourist or to amuse himself at one.

What survives, then, is not evidence that garlic built the pyramids. It is evidence that by the fifth century BC garlic was already so firmly the food of the working man that a plausible-sounding tale could be spun around it and would be believed — and, being believed, would be repeated down forty centuries until it wore the smooth authority of fact. The bulb's reputation, in other words, is better documented than any single meal ever eaten in its name. That is a truer and more interesting thing to know than the fiction it replaces.

<figure> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="100%" viewBox="0 0 640 300" role="img"> <title>Four Thousand Years in Cloves — a garlic timeline</title> <g fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1"> <rect x="10" y="10" width="620" height="280"/> <rect x="14" y="14" width="612" height="272" stroke-width="0.6"/> </g> <g stroke="#6d5577" stroke-width="1.2" fill="none"> <path d="M14 30 L14 14 L30 14"/> <path d="M626 270 L626 286 L610 286"/> </g> <g font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" fill="#43331f"> <text x="320" y="44" text-anchor="middle" font-size="15" letter-spacing="4">FOUR THOUSAND YEARS IN CLOVES</text> </g>  <line x1="60" y1="168" x2="580" y2="168" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="1.1"/> <path d="M580 168 L570 163 M580 168 L570 173" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="1.1" fill="none"/>  <g fill="#6d5577"><circle cx="110" cy="168" r="3.4"/><circle cx="240" cy="168" r="3.4"/><circle cx="370" cy="168" r="3.4"/><circle cx="500" cy="168" r="3.4"/></g> <g stroke="#a9906c" stroke-width="0.6"><line x1="110" y1="168" x2="110" y2="120"/><line x1="240" y1="168" x2="240" y2="120"/><line x1="370" y1="168" x2="370" y2="120"/><line x1="500" y1="168" x2="500" y2="120"/></g>  <g fill="none" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="1"> <path d="M92 116 L110 82 L128 116 Z"/> <line x1="110" y1="82" x2="110" y2="116"/> </g> <g fill="none" stroke="#a9906c" stroke-width="0.8"><path d="M106 108 q-4 5 0 10 q4 4 8 0 q4 -6 0 -11" /></g>  <g fill="none" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="1"> <rect x="230" y="88" width="20" height="24"/> <line x1="226" y1="88" x2="254" y2="88"/><line x1="228" y1="112" x2="252" y2="112"/> <line x1="234" y1="88" x2="234" y2="112"/><line x1="240" y1="88" x2="240" y2="112"/><line x1="246" y1="88" x2="246" y2="112"/> </g>  <g fill="none" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="1"> <circle cx="370" cy="98" r="12"/> <path d="M370 90 q-7 4 -4 12 M370 90 q7 4 4 12 M362 98 q8 -6 16 0"/> </g>  <g fill="none" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="1"> <path d="M488 112 L512 88"/> <path d="M488 112 L492 108 L516 92 L512 88 Z"/> <circle cx="504" cy="110" r="6"/> </g>  <g font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" fill="#43331f"> <text x="110" y="196" text-anchor="middle" font-size="9" letter-spacing="1">EGYPT</text> <text x="110" y="210" text-anchor="middle" font-size="6.5" fill="#6f5a40">c. 2500 BC</text> <text x="110" y="222" text-anchor="middle" font-size="6.5" fill="#6f5a40">workers' ration</text> <text x="240" y="196" text-anchor="middle" font-size="9" letter-spacing="1">GREECE & ROME</text> <text x="240" y="210" text-anchor="middle" font-size="6.5" fill="#6f5a40">soldiers & athletes</text> <text x="240" y="222" text-anchor="middle" font-size="6.5" fill="#6f5a40">strength-food</text> <text x="370" y="196" text-anchor="middle" font-size="9" letter-spacing="1">MIDDLE AGES</text> <text x="370" y="210" text-anchor="middle" font-size="6.5" fill="#6f5a40">the "stinking rose"</text> <text x="370" y="222" text-anchor="middle" font-size="6.5" fill="#6f5a40">peasant & physic</text> <text x="500" y="196" text-anchor="middle" font-size="9" letter-spacing="1">MODERN KITCHEN</text> <text x="500" y="210" text-anchor="middle" font-size="6.5" fill="#6f5a40">20th c. rehabilitation</text> <text x="500" y="222" text-anchor="middle" font-size="6.5" fill="#6f5a40">to prestige cooking</text> </g> <line x1="120" y1="252" x2="520" y2="252" stroke="#a9906c" stroke-width="0.6"/> <text x="320" y="272" text-anchor="middle" font-size="8" letter-spacing="1" fill="#43331f" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif">FROM RATION TO STIGMA TO PRESTIGE — ONE BULB ACROSS FOUR MILLENNIA</text> </svg>

<figcaption><em>Plate 7. Four thousand years in cloves — the labourer's ration on the Nile, the strength-food of Greek and Roman soldiers, the medieval stinking rose, and the modern kitchen: a history measured out one clove at a time.</em></figcaption> </figure>

A Charm Against the Dark

Running alongside garlic's career as food is a second history, older and stranger, in which the bulb is not eaten at all but hung, worn and buried as a defence against the unseen. This folklore deserves to be told as cultural history — as a record of what people have hoped and feared — and not smuggled in as fact; garlic repels no demon, and the point of the stories is not their pharmacology but their persistence.

The root of it is almost certainly the smell. A plant pungent enough to sting the eyes and cling to the breath for a day was, to the ancient mind, self-evidently powerful, and a power that could drive away serpents and clear the head might reasonably be enlisted against subtler enemies. So garlic became apotropaic — a thing that turns evil aside. Across the ancient Mediterranean and the Near East it was set against the evil eye, that universal dread of the envious or malignant glance; a bulb hung by the door or a clove tucked into a child's clothing would absorb or deflect the ill will of a neighbour. The belief is genuinely widespread and genuinely old, and it survives in corners of the Mediterranean world to this day, more habit now than conviction, the way a person may still say "bless you" over a sneeze.

The instinct is old enough to have left its mark on the founding literature of Europe. When Homer's Odysseus is about to face the witch Circe, the god Hermes arms him with a protective herb — moly, black at the root and white as milk in the flower — proof against her enchantments; and from Theophrastus in the fourth century BC onward, readers have suspected that the poet was describing one of the wild alliums of the Greek hills. The identification has never been settled, and honesty requires the caveat that it may simply be wrong, though Linnaeus liked it well enough to name a golden-flowered garlic Allium moly after the legend. But the suspicion is itself the point. Three thousand years ago, when a Greek poet needed a plant that could stand between a mortal and the powers of darkness, a bulb very like garlic was already the natural candidate for the part.

Where death came in its thousands, the charm grew ambitious enough to take on plague itself. The most durable relic of that hope is the legend of the Four Thieves' Vinegar — the vinaigre des quatre voleurs — which attaches itself, in one telling or another, to the great plague years of Marseille or Toulouse somewhere between the fourteenth century and the eighteenth. Four thieves, the story runs, were caught robbing the dead and dying and yet had somehow not sickened themselves; offered leniency in exchange for their secret, they gave up the recipe for a vinegar steeped with garlic and a fistful of aromatic herbs — rue, sage, rosemary, camphor, cloves — with which they had washed their hands and faces before each grim errand. The concoction was rubbed on the skin and sniffed against the "bad air" then blamed for contagion. There is a sober footnote to the fable, though it is not the one the tellers intended: the plague travelled by the fleas of rats, and several of those herbs are real insect-repellents, so that a body doused in the stuff may indeed have been a little less inviting to the true carrier. But that is hindsight's consolation. To the frightened households who actually mixed it, the vinegar was garlic doing what garlic had always been trusted to do — standing between the living and an invisible death.

Its most celebrated expression belongs to the Slavic and Balkan lands of eastern Europe, where garlic was pressed into service against the returning dead. In the folk practice of Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and their neighbours, garlic guarded the threshold between the living and whatever might come back across it: braids were hung over doorways and windows, keyholes and chimneys were rubbed with it to seal the house, and a corpse suspected of restlessness might be buried with garlic in its mouth so that it could not rise to trouble the living. These were not the fancies of a few; they were ordinary precautions, taken by ordinary communities, at the graveside of real grief. The vampire of the villages was a way of naming the terror of contagion and unexplained death, and garlic was one of the few weapons a frightened family could actually hold in its hand.

That this Balkan folk-belief is now known to every schoolchild in the West is the work of a single novel. When Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in 1897, he reached into the Transylvanian material and put garlic flowers into the hands of his vampire-hunter, Van Helsing, who hangs them about the neck and room of the imperilled Lucy as a physician might prescribe a medicine. Stoker took a genuine peasant custom, dressed it in the authority of science, and sent it out into the world in a best-seller — and so a clove of garlic, which had crossed four thousand years as the food of the poor and the medicine of the many, entered the twentieth century in an unexpected new office, standing guard in the popular imagination against the undead. It is a fitting turn for the stinking rose: even its superstitions are more durable than most plants' entire histories.

<figure> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="100%" viewBox="0 0 640 640" role="img"> <title>Garlic Against the Dark — apotropaic traditions of the bulb</title> <g fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1"> <rect x="10" y="10" width="620" height="620"/> <rect x="14" y="14" width="612" height="612" stroke-width="0.6"/> </g> <g stroke="#6d5577" stroke-width="1.2" fill="none"> <path d="M14 30 L14 14 L30 14"/> <path d="M626 610 L626 626 L610 626"/> </g> <g font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif" text-anchor="middle"> <text x="320" y="44" font-size="15" letter-spacing="4" fill="#43331f">GARLIC AGAINST THE DARK</text> <text x="320" y="60" font-size="8.5" letter-spacing="2" fill="#6f5a40">APOTROPAIC TRADITIONS OF THE BULB</text> </g>  <g fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1.1" stroke-linejoin="round"> <path d="M244 470 V210 A76 76 0 0 1 396 210 V470"/> <path d="M256 468 V210 A64 64 0 0 1 384 210 V468"/> <path d="M262 466 V214 A58 58 0 0 1 378 214 V466"/> 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-11 24 c 3 8 19 8 22 0 c 3 -9 0 -21 -11 -24 Z M306 320 v -5 M301 326 v 17 M311 326 v 17"/> <path d="M324 350 c -12 3 -15 16 -12 26 c 3 9 21 9 24 0 c 3 -10 0 -23 -12 -26 Z M324 350 v -5 M318 356 v 19 M330 356 v 19"/> </g> <g fill="none" stroke="#c8b79a" stroke-width="0.5"><path d="M298 280 q 8 -4 16 0 M326 306 q 8 -4 16 0"/></g> <text x="320" y="518" text-anchor="middle" font-size="8" letter-spacing="1.5" fill="#43331f" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif">THE BRAID AT THE DOOR</text>  <g fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1"><circle cx="120" cy="215" r="62"/></g> <circle cx="120" cy="215" r="57" fill="none" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="0.6"/> <path d="M102 178 a 13 13 0 1 0 0 26 a 10 10 0 1 1 0 -26 Z" fill="none" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="0.9"/> <g fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1.1" stroke-linejoin="round"> <ellipse cx="120" cy="210" rx="4" ry="8"/> <path d="M117 203 l -3 -6 M123 203 l 3 -6"/> <path d="M116 208 C 100 198 88 202 79 213 C 90 210 96 214 100 221 C 104 214 110 216 116 216 Z"/> <path d="M124 208 C 140 198 152 202 161 213 C 150 210 144 214 140 221 C 136 214 130 216 124 216 Z"/> </g> <path d="M120 240 c -8 2 -10 11 -8 17 c 2 6 14 6 16 0 c 2 -6 0 -15 -8 -17 Z M120 240 v -4 M116 244 v 12 M124 244 v 12" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="0.9"/> <text x="120" y="300" text-anchor="middle" font-size="8" letter-spacing="1" fill="#43331f" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif">THE VAMPIRE TRADITION</text>  <g fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1"><circle cx="520" cy="215" r="62"/></g> <circle cx="520" cy="215" r="57" fill="none" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="0.6"/> <circle cx="520" cy="215" r="46" fill="none" stroke="#a9906c" stroke-width="0.7"/> <path d="M486 215 Q 520 189 554 215 Q 520 241 486 215 Z" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1.1"/> <circle cx="520" cy="215" r="13" fill="none" stroke="#6d5577" stroke-width="1.4"/> <circle cx="520" cy="215" r="5" fill="#6d5577"/> <g stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="0.6" fill="none"><path d="M520 153 v 8 M520 269 v 8 M458 215 h 8 M574 215 h 8 M476 171 l 6 6 M564 171 l -6 6 M476 259 l 6 -6 M564 259 l -6 -6"/></g> <text x="520" y="300" text-anchor="middle" font-size="8" letter-spacing="1.5" fill="#43331f" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif">THE EVIL EYE</text>  <g fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1"><circle cx="120" cy="455" r="62"/></g> <circle cx="120" cy="455" r="57" fill="none" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="0.6"/> <g fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1.1" stroke-linejoin="round"> <path d="M108 452 L108 484 Q108 494 120 494 Q132 494 132 484 L132 452 Q132 440 124 438 L116 438 Q108 440 108 452 Z"/> <path d="M116 438 V424 H124 V438"/> <rect x="114.5" y="417" width="11" height="8" rx="1.5"/> </g> <g fill="none" stroke="#a9906c" stroke-width="0.6"><path d="M110 476 H130 M110 482 H130 M111 488 H128"/></g> <g fill="none" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="0.7"><path d="M120 470 V458 M120 462 l -5 -4 M120 462 l 5 -4 M120 466 l -4 -3 M120 466 l 4 -3"/></g> <path d="M132 436 H146" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="0.7"/> <rect x="146" y="430" width="18" height="13" rx="1.5" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="0.9"/> <text x="155" y="440" text-anchor="middle" font-size="7.5" letter-spacing="0.5" fill="#43331f" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif">IV</text> <text x="120" y="540" text-anchor="middle" font-size="8" letter-spacing="1" fill="#43331f" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif">FOUR THIEVES’ VINEGAR</text>  <g fill="none" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="1" stroke-linecap="round"> <path d="M474 522 C 466 500 470 478 484 466 C 500 452 508 476 496 486 C 486 494 494 448 512 438"/> <path d="M480 520 C 470 500 472 478 482 460"/> </g> <g fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1"> <path d="M512 438 q -11 -6 -5 -19 q 8 -11 13 2 q 4 13 -8 17 Z"/> <path d="M517 421 l 2 -9 M510 424 l -4 -8 M524 424 l 5 -7"/> </g> <text x="505" y="540" text-anchor="middle" font-size="6.5" font-style="italic" letter-spacing="1" fill="#6f5a40" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif">ALLIUM SATIVUM</text>  <line x1="170" y1="590" x2="470" y2="590" stroke="#a9906c" stroke-width="0.6"/> <text x="320" y="610" text-anchor="middle" font-size="8.5" letter-spacing="1.5" fill="#43331f" font-family="'Liberation Sans','DejaVu Sans',sans-serif">THE BULB SET TO GUARD THE THRESHOLD</text> </svg>

<figcaption><em>Plate 8. Garlic against the dark — the braid over the door, the bulb against the evil eye, the plague-years' Four Thieves' Vinegar, and the vampire tradition Stoker fixed in the modern imagination: cultural history, not endorsed magic.</em></figcaption> </figure>

The Forbidden Bulb

For all its four thousand years of near-universal welcome, garlic has also been, in certain disciplined kitchens, the one thing deliberately shut out — and the reasons are as revealing as any feast. Several of the great religious traditions of Asia class garlic among a small family of "pungent roots" to be renounced by anyone seeking a clear and quiet mind, and the renunciation is not squeamishness but doctrine. In much of Mahayana Buddhism the rule is explicit. The scriptures counted authoritative on monastic diet — the Brahmajala, Surangama and Lankavatara sutras among them — name five acrid plants, the wu xin, of which garlic is the chief, and set them off-limits to the serious practitioner. The reasoning given in the Surangama Sutra is precise and unsentimental: eaten cooked, these plants are said to inflame desire; eaten raw, to provoke anger; and either way their reek is held to drive off the very presences a meditator hopes to attract and to attract those he does not. Whatever one makes of the metaphysics, the observation about garlic's two tempers — sweet and rousing when cooked, harsh and combative when raw — is one this volume's chapter on chemistry would recognise at once.

The Jain objection is stricter still, and turns on the plant rather than the eater. To the Jain, committed above all to ahimsa, the doing of no harm, garlic is doubly disqualified: it is a root, and to lift a root is to kill the entire plant rather than merely to pick its fruit; and it belongs, in Jain biology, to a class of vegetables thought to shelter countless minute lives, so that a single bulb pulled from the earth is a small massacre. In the sattvic cooking prized by many Brahmin and Vaishnava Hindu households the ground shifts again: here garlic and onion are classed in Ayurvedic thought as rajasic and tamasic, foods that stir passion and dull clarity, and so are kept from the plate of anyone cultivating a calm spirit. Three traditions, three quite different arguments — the practitioner's steadiness, the plant's life, the soul's poise — and one shared verdict, that the bulb the rest of the world reaches for by instinct is, for the devout, precisely the thing to set aside.

Hindu tradition even furnishes garlic with an origin-myth that doubles as the reason for its exile. In the story of the churning of the cosmic ocean, when gods and demons fought over the nectar of immortality, the demon Svarbhanu slipped into the ranks of the gods to steal a mouthful; Vishnu struck off his head before he could swallow, and where the drops of nectar-tainted blood fell to the earth, onion and garlic are said to have sprung up. The myth catches the ambivalence exactly: the bulbs carry a trace of the immortal nectar, which is why they are potent and healing, and a trace of demon blood, which is why they are impure and unfit to set before a god. The ancient lawbook of Manu, the Manusmriti, duly numbers garlic among the foods a twice-born man should refuse, and the rule against offering it at the altar follows the same logic of potency and pollution held together in a single clove.

For all that, the very civilisation that barred garlic from the altar could not do without it in the sickroom, and Sanskrit keeps the contradiction folded into the plant's own name. To the physicians of Ayurveda garlic is rasona — from rasa and una, "lacking a taste" — because it was reckoned to hold five of the six classical flavours and to want only the sour, and a thing so nearly complete was bound to be potent. The Charaka Samhita, among the founding texts of Indian medicine, prescribes it warmly, garlic simmered slow in milk among its remedies, in the very centuries that the lawbook of Manu was setting it off the devout man's plate. Prescribed by one sage and forbidden by another, medicine and pollution at once — India contrived to hold every one of garlic's contradictions in the same two hands, which may be the most honest response any culture has ever managed to the bulb.

Islam draws the line at the threshold of the sacred rather than at the plate. A saying of the Prophet, recorded in the most trusted collections of both Bukhari and Muslim, holds that "he who has eaten garlic or onion should keep away from us — or from our mosque — and stay in his house," one narration adding that the angels are troubled by the same smells that trouble the children of Adam. It is not a ban on the food, which Muslims eat with relish, but on carrying its reek into the congregation of prayer. And there the whole scattered chorus of prohibition resolves, suddenly, into a single note. The garlic-eater turned from the temple of Cybele in Greece; the garlic-eater kept from the mosque in Arabia; the clove withheld from the Hindu altar; the reek the Buddhist scriptures say the very gods will shun — again and again, across religions that agree on almost nothing else, it is the same small bulb that is judged too earthy, too bodily, too rankly alive to be brought into the presence of the holy. The most pungent food the poor ever had was also, nearly everywhere, the one thing the sacred could not abide.

That whole philosophies and faiths have been built partly on the discipline of doing without it is the sharpest possible proof of garlic's power. How those garlic-free kitchens actually cook — and what genius they raise on the absence — is a story for the next chapter, which turns from garlic in time to garlic across the map.

Four thousand years, and the same bulb throughout — wept for by escaping slaves, rationed to soldiers, cursed at a rich man's table, named the poor man's treacle by a Greek physician, hung against the dark, made the badge of a hated people and then of another, renounced by saints, and crowned at last with a festival of its own. If garlic's history proves anything, it is that a thing may be universally useful and still be made to carry the whole weight of a society's snobberies, terrors and hopes. But history is only half the account. The other half is geography: at any given moment, garlic has meant utterly different things in different kitchens of the world, and to understand the bulb fully we must stop travelling through time and start travelling across the map — from the woks of Sichuan to the mortars of the Levant — to see how many grammars a single ingredient can be made to speak.

[^1]: The often-repeated tale that the pyramid-builders once downed tools when their garlic ration was cut is an embellishment of a real event. Egyptian state workers were genuinely paid in food, garlic among it, and the tomb-artisans of Deir el-Medina did stage what may be the first documented labour strike in history, in about the twenty-ninth year of Ramesses III (roughly 1158 BC), set down on the papyrus now in Turin. But the grievance recorded there is over late deliveries of grain, not garlic. The garlic version is a modern flourish laid over a genuine strike.

บทถัดไป · 7 / 15Chapter 4 — The World's Garlic