My Garlic Press
Garlic Press, gouache, watercolor, and graphite on cardboard, 2024
Not every object that is precious is linked to loss. I use this garlic press nearly every day and each time I pick it up I feel the connection to the friend from whom I received it. We met when we were ten, in junior high school, when she leaned forward from her seat by the classroom window and gave me a look of recognition across the front row of desks. Recognition of what? We had not yet met. But some note of common sensibility had been struck. How? By the thread of thought expressed in a classroom conversation that had just occurred, orchestrated by the teacher on a subject for which we could have had no expertise? How do we recognize those kindred souls? Something sparked her initiative and as the class dispersed, we connected, introducing ourselves. I wonder what we shared from our portfolios of child identity, how we spoke of who we were or imagined ourselves to be. Six decades later the connection persists when most of the others from that room and era have vanished.
Garlic has played a major role in my olfactory and culinary life. As a child, I discovered that the little white bulbs slipped into a roast beef before it went into the oven were responsible for its seductive fragrance. So I took a few cloves and inserted them into a favorite stuffed animal, a brown dog with long ears whose flaps created just the right envelope into which to place the fresh items. Holding the soft animal close, I regularly dug into the outer layers of the clove with my finger nails, releasing the pungent odor in a time-lapse action that kept it intermittently present.
I have no idea whether my mother knew I was a garlic thief, or if she sniffed the sharp-edge scent on my childish fingers. In the culture wars that played out with the kitchen as the field of conflict, my mother and grandmother clashed over the use of garlic in soup and other savory dishes. My mother, typically, argued for restraint while my grandmother’s ethnic cuisine, thick with chicken fat and other heavy stuff, was redolent with garlic following a long tradition in which the curative powers of the bulb were an integral antidote to the artery-clogging substances that fell onto our plates. Mythologies or realities? These are not the terms on which such generational and ideological struggles play out. Indulgence of any kind was anathema to my slim, athletic, Protestant mother whose very existence as the wife of my Jewish grandmother’s only son was a daily source of difficulty. So it goes. Garlic skirmishes were the least of it. I have had family members whose idea of cooking with garlic was to peel a clove in the same room in which they were preparing a dish. The aroma, they believed, was sufficient to infuse any meal.
But this garlic press? Dubbed the “Cadillac of garlic presses” by my friend, the object performs its essential task admirably, crushing the fresh bulbs with great ease and efficiency. The model is no longer made. The company who manufactured it has up-scaled their design, adding features such as a built in cleaner of plastic prongs that purge the openings of their residue. The ergonomically improved streamlined model is shiny and bright—and now crushes, minces, and peels in accord with advertising jingle rhetoric. A product of the Swiss company, Zyliss, mine has been in my possession for more than two decades. The engineering of the small device is admirable, the movable part that slips into place to press the cloves through the holes never misses its mark, and in spite of years of squeezing pressure, the edges of the aluminum perforations remain sharp enough to do their job.
The language on the Zyliss website is pure marketing, declaring its recent model “the best in class” for the category. No doubt this is true, as Zyliss makes superb kitchen accessories of all kinds. This was another revelation of the gift—that one might identify a brand for such objects. Hardly a surprise, but for years, even decades into adulthood, my kitchen equipment remained a hodge-podge of miscellany accumulated over years of establishing households with hand me down pots and an occasionally purchased pan or small appliance. When I was already well past the age at which most of my friends had shifted into an upscale domestic gear, I took a trip in which I visited a series of their kitchens. I was exposed to one collection of All-Clad pans after another—accompanied by Henckels knives and other fine quality accessories. My having skipped the wedding registry as a ritual, even when I got married, was perhaps part of the explanation for the absence of these things from my life. But the real explanation was simply ignorance, the kind of gap of experience that in part arose from lack of means. The realization that whole aspects of how to function in the world were not part of my experience because of the socio-economic strata in which I had grown up came in my twenties, when I had never booked a hotel room, signed a lease, or imagined purchasing sets of flatware or going to a hair salon. These had never been part of my world growing up any more than tennis lessons or ski trips.
Recognizing brands of kitchen accessories and acquiring them was a novelty. But how would I have known where to get such a fine garlic press? Let alone one with a highly specialized and well-engineered design? So the gift was not only the object, but the insight, the introduction to brands as a concept beyond that of cars, washing machines, and athletic shoes–one that extended to such humble objects. Scales fell from my eyes. Everything from paper clips to tweezers, band aids and ointments, spices and staples is identified by brand and has been for centuries—since goods were manufactured, distributed, and travelled, taking with them the conspicuously marked signs of the site of their original production.
But this week, while I was thinking about the garlic press, someone in another context mentioned that genetic research has demonstrated that all apples in the world derive from a single source somewhere in Asia. They travelled along the silk road, having already spread as agriculture flourished in the Neolithic period, a little more than 10,000 years ago. This remark made me curious about garlic—where and when it passed into cultivation and use. The methods for learning about these matters have proliferated. Aside from the remains found in archaeological sites, later mentions in recipes and medicinal manuals, and the occasional sketch of the divine bulb on various surfaces, advances in genetic research have allowed the evolution and modification of plant species to be studied in great detail. I am staggered to realize that in the same moment in which I met the friend who gifted me with the garlic press, the early 1960s, my mother was introducing me to the groundbreaking work of James Watson, Rosalind Franklin (then unacknowledged), and Francis Crick on the double helix, and processes of DNA production and RNA replication. On that foundation, species’ histories can now be traced in detail.
According to various online sources, the progenitor of our current garlic strains arose in Asia, possibly about 5,000-6,000 years ago.[1] Just for comparison, that is about four thousand years after Jericho was built, but about the same time that Egyptians started using hieroglyphics and cuneiform writing became a standardized system. This matters because the systematic trade between Mesopotamia and the Asian Steppes develops in this period as well, from about 3500 BCE. As is well known, written accounting systems and other record keeping, as well as the administrative social structures around them, develop when food stuffs can be produced in greater quantities than are immediately needed for consumption. Storage of goods requires record-keeping. Agricultural development and cultural infrastructure developed simultaneously in Western Asia and the ancient Near East. With that came the ability to manage plant species through propagation by human intervention.
Wild species of garlic existed before cultivation, and this “ancestral” plant reproduced sexually.[2] Aided by bees and other insects who transfer the pollen from plant to plant, dust from the male stamen made its way into the female pistil where the ovary resides.[3] But now almost all cultivated garlic is sterile and does not produce seeds.[4] The common variety, known by the Latin name Allium sativum, has to be propagated by human beings, mainly by separating the bulbs and planting them to create more individual plants. The relation between sterility and domestication is a topic of research, but the desire for large bulbs may have led to selective breeding that resulted in the loss of flowering ability.[5]
Quest for the original wild ancestor continues through genetic analysis, but the fact that this species can be tracked to the location that was a major home to traders is already compelling. Garlic made its way into the Indus Valley, and is discussed in early Chinese and Indian medical treatises, as well as in the highly influential work of the late-medieval Islamic scientist Avicenna (Ibn Sina), who promoted its many benefits. Physical remains of garlic have been found at Knossos in Crete. That makes it very old garlic, dated to about 1700 BCE and bulbs have also been found in King Tut’s tomb from the 14th century BCE. All kinds of powers have been ascribed to garlic, some real, some no doubt exaggerated. Athletic prowess and aphrodisiac powers have been part of the bulb’s mythology with accounts of Roman gladiators, emperors, and seducers all making use of the plant. The medical value of garlic is real—it can help to prevent infection in wounds, boost the immune system, possibly lower blood pressure and reduce cholesterol (hence its value in cuisines heavy in fat, like my grandmother’s). The point? The little bulb is powerful and potent as well as pungent, but we have bred it into a condition of dependence.
For my part, if I had any of my old stuffed animals, I would still put garlic in them.
[1] K. Kris Hirst, “Garlic Domestication–Where did it Come From and When?” ThoughtCo., updated July 28, 2019. https://www.thoughtco.com/garlic-domestication-where-and-when-169374
History of Garlic, Vegetable Facts, http://www.vegetablefacts.net/vegetable-history/history-of-garlic/
[2] Rajinder Khumal Dhall, “Fertility Restoration, True Seed production and Breeding of Garlic,” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299976524_Fertility_Restoration_True_Seed_production_and_Breeding_of_Garlic
[3] GarlicNew, “How does garlic reproduce.” June 28, 2023. https://garlicnew.com/how-garlic-reproduce/
[4] Ningyang Li et al., “Genomic insights into the evolutionary history and diversification of bulb traits in garlic,” Genome Biology, 23, Article number 188 (2022). https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-022-02756-1
[5] Himal Bhusal, et al. “Bubils in garlic inflorescence: development and virus translocation,” Science Direct. Scientia Horticulturae, Volume 285, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scienta.2021.110146