Ode To The Stinking Rose

4 min readJan 31, 2025

Or All The Cool People Love Garlic

Some foods are so common and familiar that they get overlooked. Today, we correct this for one beloved plant.

Cultivation

Describing where garlic comes from is like pinpointing where domesticating fire started. It’s lost in the mists of time. A good guess would be it grew originally in Central Asia, but that it moseyed on to Mesopotamia, South Asia, and everywhere else in Neolithic times. It was so common outside of Asia early on that it was being fed to workers on the pyramids as part of their terms of service.

That means that it gets short mentions the second people start describing plants. By 1632, a botanist by the name of Peter Lauremberg described garlic as having a black seed, a hollow stalk, and ruddy ‘tunic.’ Not sure what that all means other than people were growing the stinky rose before Nicholas Culpepper wrote that it grew from a black seed.

Culinary Uses

The very first recipes from Mesopotamia contain a whole lot of garlic. In fact, people who translated the recipes and then cooked according to their directions called it ‘garlic-forward,’ which means I need to get my hands on these recipes.

It remains present in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean food, though it definitely has gone through times of being the food of the poor.

For instance, there is plenty of passing references to people from the provinces eating garlic in Roman commentaries, but Apicius’s cookbooks from that time have only a few recipes with garlic in it. The one I found was salacaccabia, which is a bread paste with mint, cheese, and garlic. There have been resurgences of popularity though, and by the 1970’s, garlic has its own fan club, complete with a president and a book.

Medical Uses

And that gets us to the most common claims for garlic, namely that it’s good for your health.

Garlic showed up in the Ebers Papyrus 22 times as a remedy. Pliny agreed with the idea, listing many remedies using garlic himself.

The Earl Modern writer Lauremberg said it drives viciousness humidity away from unhealthy eyes and helped with ‘affections of the wind pipe.’

Hildegard Von Bingen wrote two books on medicine, ‘The Book of Simple Medicine’ and ‘The Book of Composed Medicine,’ which covers many plants and their effects because she relied, like everyone at the time, on the humoral theory and the law of signatures. If it looked strong and had a strong taste, it must make you strong and fall into the categories of humors that increases blood. She recommended garlic raw as preventative medicine, and that’s why one of my main characters insists that little children eat raw garlic every day.

Galen also thought garlic was hot and dry, in fact claiming that too much garlic would get you sick by unbalancing your humors. He recommended it for reducing phlegm.

And now you get many claims that garlic is antibacterial and a blood-thinner. Even that an Anglo-Saxon recipe for eye infections that uses garlic will defeat superbugs.

Ending Thoughts

I love garlic. Can you tell? I will eat them raw with a touch of salt, fried in butter, roasted, and boiled in a stew. Garlic is a cook’s friend regardless of resources or ethnic heritage, and this versatility and wide availability is a strength.

The medical claims are something else. Maybe mainlining garlic will reduce your bacterial load, and perhaps Galen and Sister Hildegards’ instinct to label garlic as strengthening was correct. But, for those of us who just want to eat better, garlic’s real strength is its cheapness, availability, and familiarity. It counts toward your vegetable of the day, makes other healthful foods tasty, and hasn’t been ruined by wellness influencers yet. What more do you want?