It is referenced in the Physica of Hildegard of Bingen, who was Abbess of Rupertsberg, (1098-1179) and the Trotula, a 12 th century collection of three books. Garlic made it into the most renowned medieval texts devoted to women’s health. I never saw a cat within a block of the building! The old woman who created this smelly mélange believed it kept the black cats that roamed the neighborhood away from her door! I think it did. Between a top-floor apartment I once rented in Rome and the ground floor was an obstacle of an impressive pile of garlic and onions. It certainly seems to speak to a belief in its ability to keep the unwanted away. Industrious farmers will have just enough time to gather and remove these dazed birds before they come round! Could this ability to ward off threats have inspired Bram Stoker to choose garlic as an effective vampire-repellant in Dracula, 1897? Perhaps. Birds will be become “stupefied” by it and drop to the ground like a stone… but only momentarily so. Among it’s more amazing feats is the job it does in crop fields, protecting newly sown seeds “from the remorseless ravages of the birds.” All you need to do is boil the garlic and scatter it about. In fact, Pliny devotes an entire chapter (book 29, chapter 34) to garlic. Garlic, fit for a pharaoh, was also valued as a food especially appropriate for galley slaves, soldiers, and those performing heavy labor. In any event, the ancient Egyptians seem to have held garlic in high repute, for it made its way into Tutankhamen’s tomb. 101), Pliny the Elder (died 79 CE) noted that “whenever they take an oath, the Egyptians swear by garlic and onions as though they were gods.” Why garlic and onions were granted this honor rather than, say, saffron, is not disclosed. In his encyclopedic Natural History (XIX. The magic – and magical potency – of garlic was recognized, it seems, from the moment of its emergence into European culture. The “many personalities” garlic assumes in kitchen pots and on dining tables is more than matched by a long and often ambivalent history in which it is celebrated for its curative powers and condemned as injurious, the source for all sorts of ills. Crushed with salt… it gives pungency to sauces…, it can be mild and nutty when pickled,” and it is lively in a salad! But that’s only a part of the magic. As any cook knows, it has a remarkable capacity to assume, as stated in The Oxford Companion, “many personalities – raw and crude, it has an aggressive bite which disappears when lightly cooked in oil, or simmered in stews, when it becomes sweet and mild. This liliaceous plant with its pungent bulb has played quite “an ambivalent role in Italian gastronomy.” Perhaps that’s to be expected from something that, says Wikipedia, propagates asexually and produces hermaphrodite flowers! Propagation aside, garlic’s ambivalence is its magic. ![]() The Oxford Companion to Italian Food begins the entry on garlic with a truth.
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