Last year, at a book party in Charleston, S.C., I heard a sad question. A woman pulled me aside to ask whether any of my dishes on the buffet table included garlic, onions, scallions or leeks. It was sad because, unlike me, she hates those ingredients — or, more accurately, they don’t like her so much. She was allergic to all of them: every last member of the allium family. And, unfortunately, I couldn’t think of a single thing on the table that didn’t include one or more of them in some form.
While I think of myself as fairly imaginative in the kitchen, the thought of leaving one of my favorite families of vegetables -—the aromatic foundation of so many dishes — out of everything I cook left me dumbfounded.
Honestly, I tend to go to the other extreme, especially when it comes to my favorite allium, garlic. I’ve come a long way from my college days, when I once put so much raw garlic in a potato salad at a picnic that my friends and I reeked of the “stinking rose” — from our very pores — for days. Now, I save the raw stuff mostly for vinaigrettes and love frying slivers for rice dishes, cooking cloves in vegetable broth for soup, and roasting whole heads for spreading on bread.
And every now and then, I want to make something that showcases garlic in a new way, or at least a way new to me. In 2011, it was the caramelized garlic tart from “Plenty” by Yotam Ottolenghi, but that’s a pretty rich dish (involving puff pastry, eggs and a grip of cheese). Special-occasion territory, indeed.