THE Ireland of today is so totally unrecognisable from the Ireland which joined the EEC chat is difficult to say what the greatest change has been perhaps the only way of finding out would be time travelling, both ways. And what the time traveller would notice most of all would probably be smell. We smell so differently from the people of two decades ago and by heaven, they smell differently from us, and probably up to that celestial place too.
A right shower
The daily shower was all but unknown then though there was, of course, the weekly bath Few Irish people bothered with deodorants, and the modern shower gels had yet to be invented. There must have been a powerful whiff of sweat from, the nation's armpit. Most, people smoked and presumably, reeked of tobacco, their own, other people's, and worst of all, of the cigarettes, pipes and cigars of generations gone and forgotten. We passed through, that era in a cloud of tobacco smoke, generated contemporaneously and inherited from generations of nicotinous ancestors. We stank.
But not as much as we do today, the time traveller from the past might indignantly declare as he steps out of his capsule, sniffing the air, pausing suspiciously at your mouth before wrinkling his nasty 1970s face, with his flares, his wide collars, his platform shoes. Disgusting though we might consider his sticky armpits and unflossed teeth and his hair unshampooed this past week, it would be nothing as to how he would find us to him we would reek of garlic.
Garlic once terrified people. To consume a molecule of it on Monday would still cause paranoia on Friday. An entire chemical industry existed to purge all sign of it from our breaths. Even a spring onion would cause people to dose themselves with Amplex for the rest of the summer, and to hide their faces in their shirt fronts.
And as for garlic why the really sensitive would empty industrial fire extinguishers dawn their throats to hunt slow and suffocate the last least trace of a garlic atom. To have nibbled on the outskirts of a spaghetti bolognese on a Saturday would cause a person to spend the following Thursday breathing into cupped hands and feverishly sniffing the trapped air.
Only the most reliable and trustworthy of friends, the one you could freely discuss impotence or frigidity or athletes foot with could entrusted with the inquiry "Does my breath, smell of garlic?" and that only after you had summoned, up the courage of the Kamikaze pilot pointing the plane at the American flight deck.
Flavour of the month
Now we have garlic everywhere. It is one of the key flavours of the 1990s. We have learned to take it with virtually everything some chefs seem to think that mushrooms must be obliterated with garlicdom mussels, prawns, lamb all have learned of the scourge of excessive garlic. But equally, we have also learned to be subtle about it, to allow it to infuse our dishes with wit and nuclear frugality. To rephrase Sydney Smyth's recipe for salad Let garlic atoms lurk within the bowl, And scarce suspected, animate the whole".
It is true that garlic even in its subtlest guise does not suit all dishes. Many would say it is an inappropriate companion to custard. Infuse your apple pie with garlic, and you will find much left after the first nibble. Few people would argue that garlic complements peach melba. Others are vehement in their disapproval of garlic flavoured ice cream. I myself suspect that garlic chocolate is the one which Black Magic might be a while introducing.
Why did garlic fall on such hard times? Why was it reduced to being the odd culinary resort of Mediterranean culture and Asian cooking? Irish cooking might once have revelled in its pungency I have no doubt that housewives once gathered it wild, as they gathered nettles for its fragrance and intelligence, but it died out here, as died out in Britain and not just there. Scandinavia seems to have rejected its allurements too. The cuisine of northern France and of Germany is, garlic less.
David Roser of the Garlic Research Bureau was recently in Dublin to promote his little pet bulb, and he maintains that the loss of popularity of garlic was due to the influence of the Hanoverians, who disdained the little fellows the fodder of peasants.
A question of taste?
No doubt this influenced the, British court but did it influence the Irish peasant woman who was happy enough to get any flavouring for her pot of rabbit? Did word spread," through the muddy hamlets of Ireland that mad King George was eschewing garlic, and that they were to eat it no more?
I doubt it. What makes the disappearance of garlic from, our diets all the more mysterious is that we know now, beyond all doubt, that it is good for you. It thins the blood, making it less likely that a coronary will claim you at Sutton Cross as you sit scowling at the line of cars in front you, their drivers industriously spring cleaning their nostrils with their index fingers.
Other medicinal benefits are numerous, not least because a regular consumer of garlic is a happier person and happiness is the mightiest medicine of all.
Garlic I learn has other medicinal properties, which might explain its popularity in hot countries. For example, mosquitoes and gnats are averse to the flavour of garlic flavoured blood. Perhaps this was the reason why, during a plague in France, four thieves who were given the task of removing bodies and who dosed themselves in garlic vinegar lived to a sprightly old age. David connects this dislike for corpuscles seasoned with garlic to the superstition over vampires disliking the stuff which merely confirms my low opinion of vampires, frightful bounders who never keep lunch appointments.
No doubt you would be fascinated to hear why garlic is good for you the vast arsenal of sulphides which course through your bloodstream, horsewhipping cholesterol on the steps of its club and giving stray bacteria the what for but I have no intention of doing so. David Roser's book Garlic for Health will do that for you.