Before Garlic

The sun shines bright in the Fergana Valley, reflecting on the now melting snow, revealing two outstretched strands. The waning winter has been long and cold like all winters are, whether they last three months or 10. There’s ice on the breath of the few active animals. Growth won’t begin in earnest until the spring.

The valley lies on the border of the three former Soviet Republics of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. It’s been almost 20 years since dissolution, a long time in the history of an individual’s life. Relatively, not so much. Before the Soviets there was a Shaybanid emir Shahrukh, who established the Khanate of Kokand -- to be yielded to the Russians, in between. Long before the tsars and the khans there was the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, born as an offshoot of the Selucids, beating the first pope by a couple hundred years. And before all them…back when there were many gods, not one, there was that little sprig of green peeking out from the frost.

Before the English named it gárléac, from their owned borrowed word for its taxonomic cousin the leek, and before the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus developed our modern binomial nomenclature classification system, allium sativum was being plucked from frost free ground by weathered hands. From a single clove can sprout a full head. Its ability to reproduce asexually, when needed, spread it to China where it can be found in Shandong, fried with Fengwei eggplant, and to Szechuan, where it’s mashed raw in suanni bairou, a dish of thinly sliced pork doused in a chili oil sauce. Say you lived two millennia ago on the Apennine Peninsula. If so, you would have sensed garlic’s trenchant bite in agliata, an ancient Roman sauce of olive oil, breadcrumbs, vinegar, and garlic, inside almost any insullae or countryside triclinium. Culinary movements shift like the wind, traditional cuisines can mutate and molt within a century, but garlic remains.