Chapter 4 — The World's Garlic

"It is not really an exaggeration to say that peace and happiness begin, geographically, where garlic is used in cooking." — X. Marcel Boulestin, quoted in Elizabeth David, A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950)

T he line says it half in jest, but only half. Draw a border around the parts of the world where garlic is used without apology, and you have drawn, more or less, a map of the great cooking traditions of the planet — the wok and the tandoor, the mortar and the sauté pan, the cold soups of Andalusia and the hot oils of Sichuan. Garlic is very nearly universal, one of the handful of ingredients that turns up on every inhabited continent and in almost every serious cuisine. And yet it is universal the way an alphabet is universal: the same letters, endlessly rearranged, spelling out words no other language would recognise. The purpose of this chapter is to travel that map with respect — to enter each kitchen from the inside, as a guest rather than a tourist — and to watch a single bulb be made to speak a dozen unrelated tongues.

The Middle Kingdom's Bulb

Begin where the garlic is. China grows and eats more of it than anywhere else on earth, by a margin that is almost comic: in a typical recent year the country has produced somewhere around three-quarters of the entire world's crop, well over twenty million tonnes, most of it from the eastern province of Shandong, whose county of Jinxiang bills itself, with justice, as the garlic capital of the world. China is not only the largest grower but the largest consumer and the largest exporter, which is to say that a great share of the garlic in kitchens far from Asia began its life in a Chinese field. The bulb itself arrived comparatively late, carried east along the Silk Road from the western lands — the old name hu suan, "foreign garlic" — the hu that marked the western barbarian lands — still records its arrival from beyond the passes — but once arrived it settled in so completely that its foreign origins are now a matter for scholars rather than cooks.

In the Chinese kitchen garlic is, above all, an aromatic — one of the small company of pungent things, with ginger and spring onion, that are dropped into hot oil at the very start of a stir-fry to perfume the whole dish in seconds. Smashed with the flat of a cleaver and slivered, it goes into the wok and is gone almost before it browns, leaving its scent behind in the oil like a note struck and released. But it can also be the loud voice rather than the background hum. The garlic sauces of the south are frankly, gloriously heavy on the bulb; a plate of eels or greens may be finished with a great mound of chopped raw garlic and a ladle of smoking oil poured over the top, so that the whole thing hisses and throws up a cloud of fragrance at the table. And in the north garlic is eaten as a thing in itself, raw cloves taken as a relish alongside dumplings and noodles, most memorably in the ritual of Laba garlic. On the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, in the deep of winter, peeled cloves are packed into vinegar and left to steep; over the following weeks an unhurried chemistry turns them a startling jade green, and by the Spring Festival they are ready — sweet-sharp, crisp, the emerald pickle that cuts the richness of the New Year table. It is garlic treated not as seasoning but as celebration.

Preserving garlic into sweetness is a northern art in its own right. Beyond the emerald Laba pickle the north keeps tang suan, whole heads steeped in a sweet-and-sour brine of sugar and dark vinegar until the fire has gone out of them and the cloves can be eaten one at a time from a little dish, the traditional foil to a plate of boiled dumplings or a greasy hotpot. And the northerner's taste for raw garlic is a point of regional pride: a clove bitten straight between mouthfuls of noodles, or mashed with soy and vinegar into the dip in which every jiaozi is drowned. Where the southern cook slivers garlic into the wok, the northerner is content to eat it frankly raw, the sharp companion to everything starchy and rich.

What the outsider rarely grasps is that in China garlic is a vegetable in its own right, not merely a flavouring for other things. The leafy young plant — green garlic, suan miao or qing suan — is, in the words of the cook and scholar Fuchsia Dunlop, "the most common vegetable accompaniment to twice-cooked pork," and a traditional partner to mapo tofu; its flat leaves and faintly purple base are cooked down until their pungency turns gentle and sweet. The flower stalks — garlic stems, or scapes, the suan tai of a Sichuan market — are firmer and sharper again: "Raw, they have a strong and forthright pungency," Dunlop writes, "but when you stir-fry them they become sweet and mellow," heavenly with cured meat or firm pressed tofu. And where the Sichuanese want garlic at its loudest and rawest, they raise a whole flavour category on it — suan ni, a paste of pounded raw garlic that dresses cold poached pork belly, suanni bairou, under a slick of red chilli oil and a sweet, slow-cooked aromatic soy. It is one of the region's celebrated "compound flavours," and it is garlic used with a boldness that would frighten a French saucier: no cooking, no apology, the raw bulb set squarely at the front of the mouth.

Garlic in the DNA

If China is where the most garlic is grown, Korea is arguably where it is most loved. Koreans eat garlic in quantities that are among the very highest per head in the world, and they eat it in every register at once — pounded into the paste that seasons kimchi, stirred into the fermented bean-and-chilli ssamjang, and, most startlingly to an outsider, raw: whole cloves laid on the grill beside the meat at a barbecue, or eaten crisp and blazing straight from the dish, wrapped with a strip of pork in a lettuce leaf. To a Korean palate this is not endurance but pleasure, the clean high burn of raw garlic being exactly the point.

Nothing shows the depth of the attachment better than the ssam, the wrap that ends a Korean barbecue: a leaf of lettuce or perilla loaded with a slice of grilled pork belly, a dab of ssamjang and — the non-negotiable heart of the thing — a raw sliver of garlic, gathered up and eaten in a single hot, pungent mouthful. To wrap samgyeopsal without the raw clove would strike most Koreans as simply unfinished, the one note the whole bright mouthful is built around.

The devotion can be counted, if carefully. By the estimate of South Korea's own Ministry of Agriculture, the average Korean has eaten something like six to seven kilograms of garlic a year through the 2010s and 2020s — down from around nine in the 2000s, but still, on most reckonings, second in the world only to China, whose per-head figure is more than double it. Koreans like to say they lead the world outright; the honest position is that the widely-quoted global ranking rests largely on a single market survey, and that China, not Korea, sits at the top of it. The point survives the correction handsomely: this is a nation that eats garlic by the kilogram, and knows it.

The devotion has a founding story attached to it, and it reaches back to the very origin of the Korean people. In the myth of Dangun, the legendary founder of the first Korean kingdom of Gojoseon, a bear and a tiger beg the divine Hwanung to make them human. He sets them a trial: to remain in a dark cave for a hundred days, eating nothing but mugwort and garlic. The tiger, unable to bear the hunger and the dark, gives up and flees. The bear endures to the end, and is transformed into a woman, Ungnyeo, who becomes the mother of Dangun himself. It is worth saying plainly, as a matter of honest scholarship, that the plant named in the oldest tellings may not have been the cultivated garlic of the modern kitchen at all — a wild mountain allium is at least as likely, and specialists still argue the point. But the meaning of the story does not hinge on the botany. Garlic, in the Korean imagination, is bound up from the very beginning with endurance, patience and the hard transformation of suffering into something better — the food that kept the bear in the cave until she became human. A people that tells such a story about a bulb is not going to be squeamish about it, and Koreans, cheerfully, are not; the joke that they have garlic in their blood is one they make about themselves.

To the raw and the fermented, East Asia has lately added the aged. Black garlic — the slow, weeks-long warmth that turns a whole bulb soft, sticky and molasses-dark, to which an earlier chapter of this volume gave its chemistry — is often sold as an ancient oriental secret, and it is fairer to say that its deep past is murky and its recent career is not. The controlled process behind the black garlic now on Western shelves was standardised in South Korea in the mid-2000s and spread from there to Japan, where kuro ninniku became at once a delicacy and a health craze. It is a genuine East Asian gift to the world's larder, sweet and balsamic and unlike anything raw garlic can do; and, like the best of this chapter's foods, it needs no invented antiquity to justify the love it has earned.

Across the strait, Japan tells almost the opposite story, and an honest tour must include it. Traditional Japanese cooking long kept garlic at arm's length — an inheritance, in part, of the same Buddhist scruple against the pungent roots that the last chapter described — so that the classical kaiseki table is very nearly garlic-free. Yet the modern Japanese kitchen has embraced the bulb without reserve: it thickens the tonkotsu ramen broth, seasons the gyoza dumpling, and sizzles at the yakiniku grill, and Japan grows its own prized crop far to the north, in the cold of Aomori, whose plump white bulbs fetch prices a Shandong farmer would find astonishing. Garlic long resisted on principle, then loved without restraint — the same arc the whole of this volume keeps rediscovering, run in miniature on a single archipelago.

From the Mortar

Turn west and south to the shores of the Mediterranean and the Levant, and garlic changes its grammar entirely. Here its greatest expression is not the quick sizzle of the wok but the slow, patient emulsion — the transformation of raw garlic and a stream of oil into a smooth, pale, shining sauce by nothing but pounding and time. The technique is ancient; its very name records it. The Provençal aïoli and the Catalan allioli both mean, flatly, "garlic and oil," and the Latin phrase behind them, allium oleum, tells you that Roman cooks were already grinding the two together two thousand years ago. In its oldest and purest form, the one still guarded in parts of Catalonia, allioli is exactly those two things and nothing else: cloves crushed to a cream in a mortar, into which oil is worked drop by unhurried drop until the whole seizes into a stiff, fierce, dazzlingly white paste. It is notoriously difficult and famously uncompromising — no egg to make it easy, no mustard to soften the blow, just the raw power of the bulb. The French, and most modern cooks, long ago admitted an egg yolk to steady the emulsion, which is why the aïoli of a Provençal feast is a gentler, more forgiving thing than its Catalan cousin.

Along the eastern shore the same idea takes its most spectacular form in the Lebanese toum, the subject of this chapter's recipe: a whipped white cloud of garlic, oil, lemon and salt, egg-free like the old allioli but beaten to a light, aerated fluff rather than a dense paste, and served in a heap beside grilled chicken and shawarma. And where the northern Mediterranean wanted body rather than lightness, it thickened its garlic sauces with whatever the land gave. Greek skordalia binds pounded garlic and oil with mashed potato, soaked bread or ground nuts into a robust dip for salt cod and fried vegetables. Andalusian ajoblanco, the Field Note below, loosens the same family of ingredients into a cold soup. From a mortar, a clove of garlic and a bottle of oil, the Mediterranean has built an entire genre — sometimes stiff, sometimes soft, sometimes a sauce and sometimes a soup, but always the marriage the Romans first arranged.

The same shores that pound garlic into sauce also throw it, whole and unashamed, into the pan. Italy keeps the plainest garlic dish in Europe — spaghetti aglio e olio, pasta dressed with nothing but slivers of garlic warmed gold in olive oil, a pinch of chilli and a splash of the water it boiled in, a midnight supper conjured out of a near-empty larder. Spain answers with gambas al ajillo, prawns seething in a little earthenware dish of garlic-scented oil, and with the older, humbler sopa de ajo, the Castilian shepherd's soup of stale bread, water, pimentón and a whole head of garlic, which turned a cold night and a bare cupboard into something hot and sustaining. It is the same lineage as the ajoblanco and the allioli — garlic and oil and bread, the trinity of the Mediterranean poor — assembled once again, and once again into something a rich man would gladly pay for.

Field Note — Ajoblanco

Hold up a bowl of ajoblanco and you are looking at a cold soup older than the tomato. Long before the fruit reached Europe from the Americas and turned Andalusian gazpacho red, the cooks of the Spanish south were making a pale, silken soup of the things they already had: stale bread, sweet almonds, garlic, good olive oil, a little vinegar and water, pounded together and served cold against the summer heat. The almonds are the tell. They came with the Moors, who planted the almond groves of Iberia in the centuries of Muslim rule, and ajoblanco carries that inheritance in every spoonful — a Roman technique of bread-and-oil thickening married to an Arab orchard, which is Andalusian history in a bowl.

What makes it a marvel of garlic cookery is how the bulb behaves in company. There is real garlic in ajoblanco, enough to give the soup its backbone and its name — ajo is simply "garlic" — but it does not dominate. Blended raw with the fat of the almonds and the softness of the soaked bread, its rawness is rounded off, its heat folded into the richness until what remains is a savoury hum beneath the sweetness of the nut. Málaga serves it with a few halved green grapes floating on top and a last thread of oil, so that each spoonful carries a cool burst of fruit against the garlic's low warmth. For centuries it was the food of labourers — cheap, filling, needing no fire on a scorching day — and like so much of the best garlic cookery of the world it was invented not by chefs but by poor households making a great deal out of very little. It is proof, if the volume needed one, that garlic's genius is as much for restraint as for assault: the same bulb that blazes raw on a Korean grill can, in an Andalusian bowl, all but disappear into a whisper.

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<figcaption><em>Plate 9. A world of garlic — the great cuisines that rest on the bulb: China's wok and Laba pickle, Korea's raw clove and kimchi, the emulsions of the Mediterranean and Levant, the garlic-ginger paste of India and the communities that forgo it, and the mojo and sofrito of Latin America.</em></figcaption> </figure>

Yogurt, Herb, and the Sizzling Finish

Not every Mediterranean marriage of garlic is struck in a mortar of oil. Around the eastern rim the bulb is folded raw into yogurt, tamed by its cool acidity into something a child will eat by the spoonful. The Greeks call it tzatziki — thick strained yogurt with grated cucumber, garlic and dill; the Turks call the looser version cacık and reach for mint instead — and the honest genealogy of the two runs back through the Ottoman centuries the cuisines shared. The very word tzatziki is a Greek borrowing of the Turkish, and the dish is first written down as "yogurt with cucumber and garlic" in an Ottoman cookery manual of 1844, itself heir to the yogurt cultures that came west with Turkic peoples out of Central Asia. It is the same bulb as the Catalan's ferocious allioli, but disciplined by milk rather than oil, and the result is nearly its opposite: cooling where the emulsion is hot, a companion to grilled meat rather than a challenge to it.

The Turkish kitchen carries that marriage of garlic and yogurt further than anyone, ladling a cool, raw-garlic-spiked yogurt over hot food as a sauce in its own right — over the poached eggs of the breakfast dish çılbır, over fried aubergine, over the little meat dumplings called mantı — so that each hot mouthful is answered by a cold, sharp, garlicky one. It is a whole grammar of contrast built from nothing but a clove and a bowl of yogurt.

Northward and westward, garlic learns to be a last bright note rather than a body. The French persillade is nothing but parsley and garlic chopped fine together and thrown into the pan in the final seconds — over sautéed mushrooms, pan-fried potatoes, a lamb chop — so that the garlic keeps its raw lift and never cooks down to sweetness. Its Italian cousin gremolata adds a rasp of lemon zest and is scattered, always raw and always at the last moment, over the braised veal shanks of osso buco, cutting the marrow-rich heaviness with a green, garlicky sharpness. Here garlic is neither foundation nor sauce but punctuation, a single sharp accent laid on at the very end.

The Levant and Egypt keep a finishing technique of their own, and this one is cooked. Across the region the jute-leaf soup molokhia is completed with ta'leya — garlic minced fine and fried with ground coriander in hot fat until fragrant and just golden, then tipped, still spitting, into the pot so that the whole surface hisses. The bloom of frying draws out garlic's sweetness while keeping its edge, and the sound of that final splash is, for many a household from Cairo to Beirut, quite simply the sound of dinner being finished. Between the yogurt bowl, the raw herb and the sizzling ta'leya, the eastern Mediterranean proves that garlic need not be pounded into oil to be adored — it can be soothed, sprinkled or seared, and be loved in each disguise.

The Far Kitchens

A tour that stopped at the classic garlic capitals would still leave out some of the bulb's most devoted tables. Southeast Asia is the first. In Thailand the foundation of a vast range of savoury cooking is a paste the cooks call the three friends — kratiam, prik Thai, rak pak chi: garlic, white peppercorns and coriander root, pounded together in a stone mortar and used to marinate meat, to start a soup, to season a stir-fry — the garlic supplying the body and the pungent base note beneath the pepper's heat and the root's fragrance. Thailand loves the bulb in its other forms too: crisp golden fried garlic showered over rice and noodles, and whole heads of young garlic pickled in sweet brine, kratiam dong, eaten mild and translucent beside richer food. That love of crisp-fried garlic runs the length of the region, and nowhere more happily than in the Philippines, where sinangag — day-old rice fried hard with a great deal of garlic until the cloves turn nutty and the grains take up their scent — is very nearly the national breakfast, the base of the silog plates eaten with cured meat and a fried egg at the start of the day. Vietnam pounds raw garlic with chilli, lime, sugar and fish sauce into nước chấm, the dipping sauce set on almost every table, and crisps more of it over rice and grilled pork; the cooks of Indonesia and its neighbours begin their spice pastes, the bumbu, by grinding garlic with shallot and chilli before anything else meets the heat. From Bangkok to Manila to Jakarta, a shower of crisp-fried garlic is the region's shared last flourish, the very sound and smell of a dish being finished.

Africa keeps garlic traditions of its own, no less serious for being less celebrated abroad. Across the north, the Maghreb builds its marinades on chermoula, a green pounded paste of garlic with coriander, cumin, paprika and lemon that dresses fish and lamb from Morocco to Tunisia. Further south and east, the great cuisine of Ethiopia rests on two foundations, and garlic is woven through both: niter kibbeh, a clarified butter simmered slowly with garlic, ginger and warm spices until it turns fragrant and nutty, and the fiery berbere spice world it partners, the two together giving the long-cooked stews called wat — the crimson chicken doro wat above all — their deep and rounded base. Further west the same garlic-and-ginger foundation underlies the great tomato stews of Nigeria and its neighbours and the shared pot of jollof rice, ground with onion and pepper into the base on which so much of the region's cooking is raised. Across the continent garlic is not a top note but a foundation stone, cooked long and low into the very bottom of the pot.

Even the bulb's own homeland has made a delicacy of patience with it. In Iran, whole heads of garlic are packed into vinegar and left — not for weeks but for years — to darken slowly into a soft, sweet, almost black sir torshi that is prized the longer it ages: a cousin, reached by a different road, of the Chinese Laba pickle and the Korean black bulb, and a reminder that the plant first tamed on the mountainsides of Central Asia is still, in the countries nearest its cradle, an object of real and unembarrassed devotion.

The Paste, and the Base

Nowhere is garlic's double life clearer than in India, where the same country holds it as both foundation and taboo. Across most of the subcontinent, the working base of the kitchen is garlic-ginger paste — cloves and fresh ginger pounded or blitzed together in roughly equal measure and kept ready by the bowlful, the first thing to hit the hot oil and the ground beneath curries, gravies and marinades beyond counting. To cook a great deal of Indian food is, very often, to begin with this paste; it is as fundamental to a Punjabi kitchen as stock is to a French one.

That base is only the beginning of the subcontinent's garlic. In the far south the fierce cooking of Chettinad grinds it into dark, peppery masalas for chicken and crab; across the north the Punjabi kitchen builds lasooni dishes frankly around it, the lentils of a lasooni dal finished with a hissing tarka of garlic fried in ghee until it colours, and the tandoori marinades leaning on it as heavily as on their yogurt. In much of India garlic is not merely present but loud.

And yet in the very same land there are millions for whom garlic is quietly forbidden — the Jain, and many Brahmin and Vaishnava households, for the reasons of non-violence and of spiritual poise that the previous chapter set out. What concerns us here is not the doctrine but the kitchen it produced, which is one of the world's great garlic-free cuisines and no poorer for the absence. Deprived of the allium's easy pungency, these cooks built savour on other foundations: above all on asafoetida — the resin hing, which gives a rounded, almost garlicky depth when a pinch is bloomed in hot fat — and on cumin, ginger and mustard seed. The "no onion, no garlic" cooking of Jain and many temple kitchens is not a cuisine of lack but a distinct and confident grammar, and it is a quiet marvel of this chapter that the very bulb most of India cannot cook without can, in the same streets, be done entirely and deliberately without.

Cross the Atlantic and garlic becomes, once more, a foundation — the base beneath the base. The Spanish carried both the bulb and the technique of the gentle fry to the Americas, and out of that meeting grew sofrito, the slow-cooked aromatic bottom on which an enormous span of Caribbean and Latin American cooking is built. In its Cuban form the essential trinity is garlic, onion and green pepper, diced small and softened patiently in oil until sweet and fragrant, the quiet first act of countless dishes. Beside it stands mojo, the raw garlic-and-citrus marinade that is Cuba's loud counterpart to the Mediterranean's cold sauces: garlic pounded in a wooden mortar with salt, oregano and the juice of bitter Seville oranges, poured over pork and yuca. Its own history is a small migration — the recipe travelled from the Canary Islands with generations of emigrants, who, finding neither the wine nor the olives of home, reached for the sour oranges of the Caribbean instead and made something new.

Mexico gives the bulb its own loud stage. On the coasts, camarones al mojo de ajo — prawns bathed in a great deal of garlic cooked gently in oil and butter until golden and sweet — turns garlic itself into the sauce, while its fiercer cousin al ajillo throws dried chillies into the same slow-gilded oil. Inland, garlic is toasted whole and unpeeled on a dry comal until its skin chars and its flesh turns nutty, then ground into the mother sauces and adobos as a smoky base note beneath the chillies. The Spanish brought the clove; the Mexican kitchen, like everything else it was handed, made it entirely its own — which is the pattern of this whole chapter in miniature: a garlic technique carried across an ocean, forced to improvise, and arriving as something new that is somehow still, unmistakably, garlic.

South of the equator garlic turns green and raw once more. The gauchos of the Argentine and Uruguayan pampas built chimichurri to dress the beef they seared over open fires — flat-leaf parsley, oregano and a great deal of garlic, all hand-chopped so the pieces stay distinct, loosened with oil and sharpened with red-wine vinegar and a little chilli. It is, in effect, the Mediterranean's persillade grown wild on a continent of cattle. And the Spanish Caribbean rubs garlic, in the form of adobo, into nearly every piece of meat before it cooks, while Brazil — among the heaviest per-head garlic eaters in the Americas — pounds the clove with salt into a rough paste that seasons the national pot of beans and the daily plate of rice. Handed to the New World, the Old World's bulb did not fade; it multiplied.

The Mountains and the Homeland

Between the Black Sea and the Caspian, the cooking of Georgia treats garlic with a directness that can startle even a Mediterranean palate. Its most famous expression is shkmeruli: a chicken fried until the skin shatters, then drowned in a sauce of milk and butter and an almost reckless quantity of pounded garlic, the dish named for the mountain village of Shkmeri in the region of Racha, where milk, poultry and garlic were the things a household simply had to hand. The Georgian table keeps a whole family of such sauces — garlic loosened with broth or water into niortskali and spooned over meats and dumplings — in which the bulb is not softened or hidden but set frankly at the centre of the plate. Garlic runs through the rest of the Georgian table too — pounded into the walnut sauces that clothe cold poached chicken in satsivi, stirred into the fiery pepper-and-herb paste called ajika — so that a Georgian feast is threaded with it from the cold dishes to the hot. It is a cuisine that never learned to be embarrassed by garlic, and is the more joyful for it.

Northward, across the cold countries of the Slavs, garlic warms a cuisine of long winters. In Ukraine the soft yeast rolls called pampushky are brushed while still hot with an oil beaten full of raw garlic and parsley and set beside a bowl of crimson borscht, the sharpness of the one cutting the earthy sweetness of the other. Across the region a rubbed clove flavours the cured pork fat, salo, that carries a household through the dark, and a garlic soup answers a Czech or a Ukrainian cold. Here garlic is not sunshine but fuel — a bright, pungent defiance thrown against the winter.

And so the world tour comes, without quite intending to, back to its beginning. For all these kitchens — the Sichuan wok, the Catalan mortar, the Georgian pan, the Ukrainian oven — are cooking with a plant that came, every one of them, from a single small corner of the earth. The wild ancestor of cultivated garlic grows in the foothills of the western Tien Shan, along the borders of what are now Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan; it was there, in Central Asia, that garlic was first taken into cultivation some five thousand years ago, and there that its greatest natural diversity still survives. In the markets of Samarkand and the Ferghana valley the bulb is still sold in plaited ropes and eaten with real appetite, crushed into the fat-slicked rice of a plov and its wild mountain relatives gathered each spring, so that the plant has never truly left the hands that first tamed it. Every clove in every dish in this chapter is a descendant — carried out along the trade roads to the ends of the earth and bent to ten thousand local purposes — of the bulbs those first mountain farmers chose to keep. The world's garlic is, in the most literal sense, one family scattered. It may be why, for all the radically different grammars, a clove crushed in Tbilisi and a clove crushed in Oaxaca still, unmistakably, smell of the same thing.

Toum — Lebanese Whipped Garlic Sauce

The Levant's answer to aïoli: a fluffy white cloud of pure garlic held together by nothing but its own flesh, oil, lemon and salt — no egg, no compromise.

Makes about 500 ml (2 cups) · Time 20 minutes

Ingredients

120 g (about 1 cup) peeled garlic cloves, any green sprouts removed
1 tsp fine salt
480 ml (2 cups) neutral oil (such as sunflower or a mild vegetable oil), at room temperature
60 ml (¼ cup) fresh lemon juice
1 tbsp ice-cold water, if needed

Method

Put the garlic and salt in a food processor and blitz to a fine, wet purée, stopping to scrape down the sides so no clove escapes whole.
With the motor running, begin adding the oil in the thinnest possible thread — at first almost drop by drop. Patience here is everything; rush the oil and the sauce will break.
After a little oil has been absorbed and the mixture looks pale and creamy, add a teaspoon or two of the lemon juice. Continue alternating: a slow stream of oil, then a little lemon, then more oil, keeping the machine running throughout.
As you go the toum will climb and thicken into a glossy white paste the texture of soft ice cream. Once all the oil and lemon are in, it should stand in fluffy peaks. If it looks oily or begins to loosen, a teaspoon of ice water whipped in will usually bring it back.
Scrape into a jar and rest, covered, in the refrigerator for a day before using; the raw heat mellows and the flavour settles.

Cook's note: Serve with grilled chicken, shawarma or roast vegetables — a little goes a long way. Toum keeps in a sealed jar in the refrigerator for up to a month, and should always be stored cold: the lemon juice acidifies it, which is part of what keeps it safe, but this is emphatically not the same as raw garlic left in plain oil at room temperature, which (as the next chapter warns) is a genuine botulism risk. Keep your toum in the fridge and it will reward you for weeks.

One bulb; a dozen unrelated kitchens; no two of them agreeing on what it is for. To the Sichuan cook garlic is a scent thrown into hot oil and gone, or a green vegetable in its own right; to the Korean a raw clove eaten for its blaze; to the Thai a paste pounded with pepper and coriander root; to the Filipino a plate of rice fried gold in it; to the Catalan a stiff white emulsion beaten by hand; to the Greek a coolness stirred into yogurt; to the Georgian a milk sauce poured without restraint; to the Andalusian a whisper beneath the almonds; to the Ethiopian a foundation cooked into the bottom of the pot; to the devout Jain a thing best left in the ground altogether. What holds this scattered family together is not a flavour but a fact — that almost everywhere people cook seriously, they have reached for this same small, pungent, generous bulb, itself the child of one Central Asian mountainside, and bent it to their own ends. Having seen how the world uses garlic, the volume turns now to how it is actually handled: to the knife and the heat and the mortar, and to the small daily craft, common to every one of these kitchens, of coaxing a raw clove into exactly the flavour a dish requires.

บทถัดไป · 8 / 15Chapter 5 — The Cook's Ingredient