Butter Up: Garlic Brings Butter to New Highs

Garlic used as it should be used is the soul, the divine essence, of cookery. The cook who can employ it successfully will be found to possess the delicacy of perception, the accuracy of judgment, and the dexterity of hand which go to the formation of a great artist. Mrs. W. G. Waters, author of The Cook’s Decameron: A Study in Taste

The aromatic allure of garlic combined with the satisfying smoothness of butter—it just doesn’t get better than this.  Bring on the parsley and the breath mints, because we are about to make a deeply pungent dive into the story of garlic and its perfect soul mate, a stick of butter.

Sweet ascent: With a 6,000 year history, garlic has been part of just about every cuisine worldwide, from Asia, Africa and Europe, to India, Egypt and Russia. The influential clove was fed to workers building the Great Pyramid of Giza because of its alleged stamina-boosting properties, and in the Middle Ages, was avidly consumed by Europeans looking to stave off the Black Death. Even with its medicinal properties, garlic was still considered a peasant class food for centuries, although it was noted in A Mediterranean Feast that with the right preparation, it could be a gentlemen's food.

In America, the road to garlic was equally rocky--introduced by the Spaniards, cultivated by the Choctaw Indians, but commanding no respect right through the early 1920s, when it was not so affectionately dubbed “Bronx vanilla” and “Italian perfume.” It took the powerhouse reps of James Beard and Craig Claiborne to break through in mid 20^th century and spread the garlic love. Beard’s “Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic” introduced the pleasures of softened garlic on pumpernickel bread, “a wonderful buttery paste perfumed with garlic.” Claiborne described garlic as absolutely essential in dishes like aioli, the Italian garlic 'bath' for vegetables known as bagna caoda, and skordalia, the Green garlic mayonnaise.  From the early ‘70s to now, Americans have learned to embrace the piquant perfume of garlic, with its use quadrupling over the decades, according to the Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America.

Avec butter, even better: First mentioned by famed French chef Antoine Beauilliers in 1814’s Le Cuisinier Royal, the instructions for “Beurre d’Ail” or garlic butter were simply described: “Take two large cloves of garlic, pound them in a mortar, and reduce them to a paste, by mixing with a bit of butter about the size of an egg. This garlic butter may be put into any sauces you think proper.” A century and half later, the American pioneer of fresh and sustainable food, Alice Waters, makes a garlic puree in her best-selling The Art of Simple Food that’s true to the original, using two heads of garlic, separated into cloves, with chicken broth, butter or olive oil and sprigs of thyme, rosemary and sage. She recommends using every bit of it; even the drained liquid from the garlic is very tasty. “Garlic puree is delicious stirred into mashed potatoes or a soufflé base…it makes a tasty compound butter with a bit of salt and will make a gravy taste sublime,” Waters says.

Food bloggers note that there are dozens of ways to add depths of flavor to simple garlic butter recipes, with ingredients such as lemon for a tart note, hot sauce, black pepper, paprika for a spicy kick, finely ground onions or shallots, a dash of ground mace for warmth, or rosemary for a pine flavor that works well with meat dishes. There are just as many uses for the versatile spread—its traditional pairing with escargots makes an elegant appetizer, and it’s equally at home with roasted mushrooms, grilled asparagus and corn on the cob, prawns, mussels, tilapia, steak, oven fries and seared

shrimp.

The United Tastes of America takes Garlic Sauce to a whole new level!

Food Guy  
March 24, 2013