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Garlic For What Ails You

Garlic brings me joy.  I have always liked the flavour, and I have always liked the smell.  Even garlic on the breath doesn't disconcert me - in fact, it hardly even registers on whatever Richter-equivalent scale there might be for bad breath, unless it's combined with something more frightful.  In fact, a little garlic on the breath usually suggests good things to me - that someone has eaten both well and fearlessly, enjoying food without senseless worry over potential social consequence.

I like the way garlic peps up otherwise pedestrian dishes, and I like the way it plays well with other spices, other flavours.  Garlic is not a one-trick pony. The bite of raw garlic in a creamy hummus is a different taste altogether from the smooth and sweet savory flavour of roasted garlic.  It can be a subtle accent, portioned carefully into a recipe or rubbed against the inside of the bowl to add the merest whisper of flavour, or it can hog the show and permeate every other component of the dish.  Even as a star ingredient, garlic can play it rustic or sophisticated. Persillade, a classic condiment for steamed potatoes or noodles, is a mixture of parsley and raw garlic that is tossed dressing-like with the starch of choice, with a little salt and olive oil to bring it all together.  The heat of the cooked starch gently takes the raw edge off the garlic and allows the flavours to mingle beautifully.  More exotic still, the famed Chicken with Forty Cloves can cause some folk to recoil merely at the name, but they are missing out on a treat.  Chicken with Forty Cloves, in all its oodles of variations, is a mellow, soothing dish, a braised wonder of succulent chicken and sweetly subtle garlic where the garlic is actually used as a vegetable unto itself, rather than as a boost to other components.

Sliced, whole, pressed, or crushed, fresh garlic is not only affordable, it’s cheap at the price.  Even in the least economical supermarket, a whole bulb of garlic seldom costs more than a quarter of a dollar, so even if it starts to grow in your kitchen before you can use it all, you're not exactly throwing money down the sink by splurging on the good stuff.  And good stuff it is, as we are discovering, in more ways than the purely culinary applications.  Health benefits from garlic are being shouted from the rooftops of complimentary medicine.

Historically, garlic has always enjoyed an excellent reputation for its medicinal properties even though its culinary acceptance was rather uneven, as it was often considered to be a vulgar herb.  Throughout history, garlic has been considered curative for almost everything from digestive disorders to tuberculosis to baldness, with varying degrees of accuracy based on the specific chemical properties of garlic.

What do we really know about garlic?  It is an antioxidant, and therefore an appropriate preventative measure for various types of cancer, as well as fungal infections and bacterial imbalances.  How it functions is less clear.  When garlic is crushed, it creates a substance called allicin, giving the distinctive smell we recognise as “garlic” (the fact that Chicken with Forty Cloves is made from whole, un-crushed/sliced/spindled/mutilated cloves of garlic is one of the reasons for the mellow sweetness of smell and flavour of the dish). Allicin’s beneficial properties (antioxidant) are reduced or removed by cooking and time, so the raw-er and the sooner the crushed garlic is consumed, the more potentially positive aspects it brings to the party.  Therefore, uncooked garlic, or garlic that has been added to a dish right near the end of the cooking time, has the most health benefits.

Garlic has more going on than allicin, though: more than 30 substances containing sulfur which contribute to garlic’s illness-fighting abilites.  Alliin, one of these compounds, creates allicin when it comes into contact with the enzyme allinase, another component of the garlic.  Alliin is also the element that is attributed to garlic’s antibiotic and antibacterial properties (researched and reported by Louis Pasteur in 1858), claimed by some to be as strong as 1% penicillin.

Modern western interest in eastern therapies has led to the use of garlic to treat high blood pressure, arthritis, and some forms of yeast overgrowth or fungus (such as athlete’s foot).  Developments in therapeutic use of garlic has resulted in what is called “odourless (or odour-controlled) garlic” – a supplement that even the most socially nervous can take without fear of halitosis.  Since much of the medicinal power of garlic is described as being harnessed in the raw, freshly ruptured, recombinant aspect of the compounds within the garlic clove, I am not sure how to regard this product.  The packaging claims that it contains a (variable) dose of allicin, but I am unclear on how the manufacturers are able to stabilize the allicin’s short shelf-life.

Garlic has been a part of human culinary and medicinal repertoire for so long that its origins are shrouded in mystery.  Consensus is that the plant may have been originally indigenous to southern Siberia, but growth and use became wide-spread so long ago that it is difficult to trace out its true beginning.  Garlic has become so universally available and prevalent in so many world cuisines that it is almost impossible to visualize what international cuisine would be like in its absence – the difference would be catastrophic.  The historical social ramifications would also be daunting: garlic was long used in talismans against everything from werewolves to vampires, from general misfortune to sorcery.  It was sometimes used to ward of plague, although this may be attributed to an ill-educated confusion between medicinal properties, where garlic might logically be used to treat plague, and magical properties, which would protect the wearer from contracting plague.

Every culture treats garlic a little differently, and not everyone embraces it wholeheartedly.  In certain forms of Chinese Buddhism, garlic (along with onions) is shunned along with other pungent foods for warming the blood too much, which is said to make meditation more difficult, although medicinal applications are considered appropriate in some circumstances.  The British, until relatively recently, were likely to view garlic with a hint of suspicion – if not for its strong flavours, for its association with French cookery, which was problematic at least in part due to the long history of enmity between England and France.

Mankind has been studying garlic for an awfully long time, and still has not satisfactorily catalogued the breadth of its benefical elements and properties.  Long considered a sort of “poor man’s penicillin” it has had attributed to it more myth and legend than pretty much any food we eat.  It tastes delicious, though, and it cures scurvy and repells vampires.  What more do you need to know?

March 2006