WITH ALL the fuss over Bastille Day this week, Garlic Day went almost unnoticed. Then again, for the past 200 years or so, most such days do, writes Frank McNally.
The French revolutionary calendar that spawned Garlic Day and 364 similar commemorations was as short-lived as it was radical. It was observed for about six years from 1793, and half-observed - alongside the old Gregorian calendar - for eight years after that. At which point, even the pretence was dropped.
The calendar was officially abolished on January 1st, 1806 - or, as the revolutionaries would have said, on 11 Nivose (Month of Snow), Year XIV. Thereafter, its revocation of weeks, Sundays, and saints' days, along with its subdivision of the year into 12 30-day units, mostly named after the weather, plus five complimentary days (the "sans-culottides"), passed into history. The only legacy of the experiment was to give chronologists of the period a headache.
Arguably the calendar's most colourful feature was its insistence on honouring plants, animals, and tools of work. Every dog had its day in the revolutionary year - on 5 Nivose, to be exact - part of a scheme whereby all dates ending in 5 were called after animals. There was a horse day and a pig day too. Even the humble trout was recognised.
Dates ending in 0 were allocated to farm implements and other tools. The rest of the calendar went to minerals and plants, with - France being France - a strong emphasis on food. Garlic, the cornerstone of the cuisine, was honoured on 27 Messidor (Month of Reaping), which this year would have been July 16th.
There is, of course, nothing uniquely French about garlic. The plant probably originated in central Asia and its culinary and medicinal talents were famous enough 3,000 years ago for the Egyptians to bury cloves of it with their dead. In that other great cuisine of Europe, Italian, it has been a feature since Roman times. And Italy has at least as strong a claim over it as France, despite Silvio Berlusconi's efforts to banish it from the nation's kitchens.
In his entertaining book Delizia: The Epic History of Italians and their Food, John Dickie recalls the role played by garlic in the infamous G8 summit held in Genoa in 2001 but overshadowed by rioting and the fatal shooting of an anti-globalisation protester.
The Liguria region had been determined to showcase its food during the event, and its 16 Michelin-starred chefs were lined up to produce meals for the VIPs. But from the menus forwarded to the Italian foreign ministry for approval, two dishes were barred. One was rabbit - which apparently risked offending the pet-loving British and North Americans.
The other, to local astonishment, was the region's signature creation, Pesto Alla Genovese, which was replaced on the approved menus by "basil sauce". The essential difference between the two sauces was that the latter had no garlic. Suspicions immediately fell on Berlusconi, who hates the plant and has been known to dispense breath-freshening mints to colleagues from whom he gets a whiff.
Genovesan anti-globalists were doubly outraged - whereupon garlic cloves joined the range of ammunition being thrown by protesters.
Berlusconi's vendetta was escalated by proxy last year when the news editor of one of his TV networks denounced the plant (in a newspaper owned by Mrs Berlusconi) and threatened to compile a food guide recommending only garlic-free restaurants.
No doubt to the prime minister's great regret, Italians were central to introducing garlic, belatedly, to the tables of America, where it was shunned until the 20th century. As for the Irish, who shared the traditional British and US distaste for the plant, we may have Ukraine to thank for helping us get over the taboo, insofar as we have.
Cynics have identified Chicken Kiev as Ireland's national dish (and its connections with this country are probably as authentic as they are with Kiev). But the famous stuffed chicken breast has acted as a sort of Trojan horse by which garlic was smuggled into the Irish cuisine. Once inside, it emerged to overwhelm the guards and create that modern Irish culinary classic: garlic chips.
The sauce for chips aside, Ireland's relationship with the plant remains coy. Recipes still tend to mention "a hint of garlic". ("A hint of chilli" is common too. Recipe writers are very fond of their hints; why can't they just come straight out and say it?) But the previous horror of the bulb has disappeared. Except among vampires, of course. In common with Silvio Berlusconi, the undead still cannot stand the smell of garlic - a notion made popular by an Irish writer Bram Stoker.
Garlic has had many strange powers attributed to it over the centuries. One of the earliest urban myths was that if you rubbed magnets with it, they lost their magnetism - something held to be true by Plutarch, Ptolemy, Pliny the Elder, and a long line of scholars up to modern times who never got around to disproving it by experiment.
The plant's supposed power over vampires at least has a certain logic. Garlic's ability to repulse humans is well known to anyone who has eaten too much of it on a date. But it is also reputed to be a natural insect repellent - deterring, among other pests, that vampire of the entomological world, the mosquito.
fmcnally@irish-times.ie