For the Curious — Further Reading

For the Curious — Further Reading

A starting shelf, the science and the love in roughly equal measure; primary and authoritative sources first.

• Eric Block, Garlic and Other Alliums: The Lore and the Science (2010) — the definitive account of the chemistry, by the chemist who did much of the defining work, including the naming of ajoene.
• Chester J. Cavallito & John Hays Bailey, "Allicin, the Antibacterial Principle of Allium sativum," Journal of the American Chemical Society 66 (1944): 1950–1951 — the paper that first isolated and named allicin and reported its power to kill bacteria; the primary source behind the "wound" at the heart of this book.
• Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (2004) — the indispensable general reference; its allium pages underpin much of this volume.
• Robin Cherry, Garlic, an Edible Biography (2014) — a readable cultural history, from antiquity to the modern clove.
• E. Lissiman, A. P. Bhasale & M. Cohen, "Garlic for the common cold," Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (2014) — the sober, much-cited assessment behind this volume's sixth chapter.
• Karin Ried, Catherine Toben & Peter Fakler, "Effect of garlic on serum lipids: an updated meta-analysis," Nutrition Reviews 71, no. 5 (2013): 282–299 — the large synthesis (thirty-nine trials) behind this volume's careful account of garlic and cholesterol.
• Karin Ried, "Garlic lowers blood pressure in hypertensive subjects, improves arterial stiffness and gut microbiota: a review and meta-analysis," Experimental and Therapeutic Medicine 19 (2020): 1472–1478 — the source of the modest, genuine blood-pressure figures the medicine chapter reports.
• Alexandre Dumas, Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine (1873) — the novelist's vast, discursive last work, and the source of his declaration that the very air of Provence is the more wholesome for its garlic; a named cuisine authority for the volume's French material.
• Elizabeth David, A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950) and French Provincial Cooking (1960) — the writer who reintroduced garlic and Mediterranean cooking to a wary post-war Britain, and, at one remove, the source of this volume's Boulestin epigraph.
• Claudia Roden, A Book of Middle Eastern Food (1968), and Fuchsia Dunlop, Land of Fish and Rice (2016) — two of the many cuisine authorities on whose kitchens Chapter Four leaned.