For centuries people have attributed medicinal qualities to garlic. And in more recent years scientists have studied garlic’s potential for healing. No one can say with certainty that the risk of heart disease or cancer is reduced by eating garlic, but it is certain that garlic improves the flavor of food.
Garlic has long had a bad image. Garlic, like all alliums, contains sulfurous compounds that can burn the mouth and eyes and leave a powerful smell on the breath. (Many believed that garlic was strong enough to repel a vampire.) The English writer John Ruskin called garlic a “strong class barrier,” good for laborers, perhaps, but nothing that would be brought into a decent kitchen. Amelia Simmons, in the first American cookbook, wrote, “Garlicks, tho’ used by the French, are better adapted to the uses of medicine than cookery.” In 1896 Oscar Tschirky, better known as Oscar of the Waldorf, put 3,455 recipes in his famous cookbook, but only one featured garlic. Sixty-five years later, when Craig Claiborne’s The New York Times Cookbook appeared, things were starting to change. Although only two of the fifteen hundred recipes in the book contained the word “garlic” in the title, there were dozens of others in which a clove or two had made its way onto the page (sometimes qualified as optional).
