Smell Confessions

First thing in the morning, the dog breathes on my face.  Even though I brush her teeth every single day, Bisou’s morning breath is a little off.  And yet, while I recognize its slightly swampy overtones, it pleases me.  If it were the breath of another dog, I would probably be offended by it, but it is the breath of my dog in whom I am well pleased, and so it is o.k. 
  
When they first put my newborn daughter in my arms, I bent to smell her hair and was instantly transported back to the five-year-old me, standing with my grandfather in the pig barn.  One of the sows had just farrowed, and my grandfather reached into the wiggling, snuffling litter, picked up a piglet, dry and clean from its mother’s tongue, and gave it to me to hold.  I put my nose to its cream-colored bristles, and inhaled the subtly rancid scalp smell that twenty years later would be my first experience of motherhood.  

I've never met a stinky cheese I didn't like-- Camembert or Taleggio, the riper and runnier the better as far as I am concerned.  On the other hand, and this may seem strange coming from a former goat lady, I cannot abide the "goaty" tang of most goat cheeses.  It is the musk of the rutting buck, and if you ever go near one of those Beelzebub-like creatures, dousing himself with his own urine in preparation for lovemaking, you won't forget it.  Milk absorbs smells easily, and the scent of a buck in the farm down the road can contaminate the milk of a sweet-smelling doe.  When my does came back from their autumn visits to the buck, I would feed their milk to the dogs and chickens for three days before I could even think of making cheese with it.  But lots of  people appreciate a whiff of buck in their cheese, and who am I to judge?

For my part, I find the smell of skunk as I drive down a country road in summer pleasantly reminiscent of the Jovan musk cologne that I used to splash on myself every morning back in the 80s, when shoulder pads proclaimed our womanly assertiveness and it was not yet politically incorrect to wear perfume.

What It's Like In Vermont Right Now

"The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,
His song so pitched as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom..."
(Robert Frost, Two Tramps In Mud Time)

I was out planting the cool-season seedlings yesterday--lettuce, broccoli, kale and arugula--and Frost got every single detail right.  First, the sun that made me unzip my jacket;  then, the cloud and the freezing wind that made me zip up again;  and even the bluebird showed up.  He was singing pretty loudly on top of his ash tree, but he didn't excite any flowers to bloom.

The buds on the apple trees are as dry and tight as they were in February, but the chamomile is sprouting between the slate slabs on the patio.  And here is what makes me dizzy with joy:  the garlic is up!  Last fall I finally got brave and planted two 4'x4' beds with nothing but garlic, and now it's sprouting and it's all I can do to keep from breaking off those turgid little scapes and munching on them. 

You must understand, garlic is one of the things I like best in the world.  Once in a restaurant, having first obtained my spouse's permission, I ordered a whole baked head of garlic as my meal, along with some bread.  I loved every bite.  Now it looks like I'll have all the garlic I could possibly want, right outside the back door. 

A word of caution to local friends and neighbors:  come garlic harvest time in mid-summer, you may want to keep a safe distance away from me.

Garlic Confessions

For me, the smell of garlic sauteeing gently in olive oil is the quintessential smell of food, of hearth and of home.

No wonder: I was weaned on garlic soup. This dish of the gods started out, like many others, as a dish of peasants. The list of ingredients says it all: water, dried out bread, lots of garlic, and an egg.

You start by heating a quart of salted water (or, if you are rich, a quart of broth). Meanwhile you chop up your leftover “French” bread that has gotten too hard to eat. Next you brown lots of garlic in olive oil, making sure not to burn it. What does “lots of garlic” mean to a Spaniard? As many as 15 cloves per quart of liquid. Dump the bread and the oil and garlic into the water and, at the last minute, break an egg or two into it, swirling it with a wooden spoon so that the white hardens into lovely threads. Don't let the soup boil, but serve it hot.

Like all such dishes, garlic soup tolerates all kinds of additions: sauteed peppers, bits of ham or chorizo, chopped vegetables. But our family always had it in its pure form.

Garlic sauteeing in olive oil was for me the start of all things good, especially the sauces that adorned our meat dishes—chicken, rabbit, snails....Then there is garlic rubbed on a substantial piece of bread, on which you then rub a ripe tomato until the juice soaks in, followed by a sprinkling of olive oil and salt. This is pa amb tomaquet, the ultimate Catalan soul food.

Have I met a clove of garlic I didn't like? I don't think so, though I detest the chopped up garlic that comes in bottles. True to my Mediterranean DNA, I can consume large quantities of garlic at a sitting. At lunch in a restaurant one day, having first obtained my husband's permission, I ate as my only entree an entire baked head of garlic.

This brings me to one of the minor tragedies of my married life: my husband doesn't like garlic. His entire family dislikes it. They have German and Irish blood in their veins, and garlic is an alien, evil substance to them.

I have a theory about why I married a man who dislikes garlic. Research has shown that women choose as mates men whose immune systems are completely different from those of their (the women's) fathers, so their offspring will enjoy a broader spectrum of protection. I'm sure that my father's immune system reeked of garlic, so to balance things I unconsciously chose a man whose only previous exposure had been to the garlic bread served in pizza joints. The proof: we had amazingly healthy kids.

In deference to my husband's tastes, I have had to rein in my passion and use garlic in less than industrial quantities. Last week, however, I went on a garlic rampage. I chopped up six large cloves, fried them in olive oil, and drizzled the contents of the pan over a piece of bread. That was my lunch, and it was fabulous.

Now I know what you're thinking: doesn't her breath smell horrible? Well, as compared to what? If you go to a Mediterranean country, you soon stop smelling people's garlic breath, because you are as full of it as everybody else. In this country, I often smell garlic on people's breath. It doesn't exactly make me want to get close to them, but it doesn't gross me out, either. Instead, I immediately think, hmmm, I wonder what he/she had to eat? Was it good? When was the last time I had garlic?

I heard on NPR recently that in Georgia—the area that became famous because of the large proportion of centenarians in the population--people consume a cup of mint tea with a bunch of garlic cloves pressed in it for breakfast every day. The older they are, the more cloves they put in: five cloves if they are in their eighties or nineties, and six to eight cloves if they are over a hundred.

I'm going to try this tomorrow and let you know how it turns out.