When I talk about Italian food in the United States, there is one unavoidable ingredient: garlic.
Garlic seems to be everywhere, and it appears to be inextricably connected to Italian cooking. Italian-American restaurants' menus ooze garlic: garlic bread, garlic knots, garlic sauces of all kinds. Historically, garlic has been called "Italian vanilla," and early Italian immigrants to the United States have been called "garlic eaters." In a list of the The 12 Best Garlicky Dishes in New York, published by the food website Grubhub, nearly half of them are from Italian restaurants. There is a New York City pizza place called Garlic, and a famous Italian restaurant in San Francisco is called The Stinking Rose. And yet, growing up strictly Italian, my diet has been mostly garlic free, and my main complaint with Italian-American food is that it's way too heavy on garlic.
So what happened? How did garlic became such a central element in Italian-American food, while so many Italians shun it?
I got in touch with some culinary historians to try and understand why garlic has become such a big staple of Italian-American cuisine. Unfortunately, there are no scientifically proven facts, but a number of reasons that mostly add up to one thing: immigration.
Beside its debated strong taste, garlic has several qualities that made it especially popular with Italian immigrants who came to the United States: it's cheap, it stores well, and it's supposedly very good for your immune system.
So good that "the Egyptians fed it to the people who built the pyramids, and that marathon runners would eat it before the race," according to Robin Cherry, a New York-based food writer who published a whole book about garlic, called Garlic: An Edible Biography: The History, Politics, and Mythology behind the World's Most Pungent Food.
"When Italian immigrants came to this country, they were penniless and may have used garlic to mask the poor quality of their food," says Robin Cherry. "It also may have to do with the fact that much of our produce has had the taste bred out of it, so it will last longer on grocery store shelves, and we try to compensate by adding garlic and other strong flavors."
In the past, garlic was used in the United States to discriminate against Italian, Jewish, and Korean immigrants. It was seen as an unfortunate and unpleasant food. Its perception started to change in the Fifties, also thanks to Julia Child, who introduced French cuisine to an American audience. Since then, it's become a perfectly acceptable and often revered ingredient.
So much so, that for recent Italian immigrants and visitors, garlic is overused more often than not. "The late cookbook author Marcella Hazan, who's credited with introducing authentic Italian cooking to Americans, tried to warn us, cautioning that "The unbalanced use of garlic is the single greatest cause of failure in would-be Italian cooking," says Robin Cherry. Alas, we didn't listen.