Anca L. Szilágyi at Orion:
Spice is expensive; much blood has been spilled in the quest for spice. Garlic is ubiquitous.
My dad is obsessed with San Francisco’s The Stinking Rose, a restaurant that uses garlic every which way, including in ice cream. We are of Transylvanian stock, our family, hearty eaters of abundant garlic, to keep away those pesky vampires. In Les Blank’s 1980 documentary Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers, a chapter chairman for Lovers of the Stinking Rose, which predates the restaurant, wearing a garland of garlic heads, opines on the “real” vampires of the world. Sucking blood is a metaphor. True vampires suck energy. The example he cites: seventeenth-century food snob Li Lu Wong who asserted he never ate garlic or onion, only the tips of chives. This snob’s idea of fancy? Plain boiled rice flavored from the dew of wild roses.
I tried spring garlic ice cream once, from a different establishment in a different city; I was unenthused. You could barely taste it! What was the point?
My young son, fitting in with the family right away, licks vinaigrette replete with minced garlic out of a big empty salad bowl.
More here.
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