vampryic food

Garlic.

Bulbous, papyrus-skinned, globes of garlie lie in my copper container on my kitchen counter. Vampire non-food.

For years I used to track down vampire literature, reveling in the seductive and repellant themes, especially during Halloween time. I read Dracula the classic by Stoker in college when working in a bookstore. The point was, I worked the night shift. After seven p.m. few came to buy books and my little store was across, dear reader, the alleyway from the main store. At nine when we closed I would shuttle the money bag back to the main store. Sure, I began to read about Vlad Dracul but by the middle of the book you have got to be kidding...now way was I going to finish it and walk across that alleyway. I finished it in the light on weekends.

But still, I love the stories and have collected them over time up to The Historian which had it all: Turkey, the Romanian connection, travel, sex, threat, and the vampires. I like to think of Ottoman Turks terrorized under the shadow of the Hagia Sophia by the bad, evil, vampires. It fits that region.

so back to garlic.

When I use garlic I cannot help but think of its association with DRacul. And, in a strange kitschy way I have a Turkish charm in my kitchen: faux garlic wrapped with blue evil eye beads. I like to think instead of the stake and cross that the evil eye and garlic would repel the undead.

But tonight I am cooking the dead, dead chicken. And for that matter: dead arugula, radishes, corn, and grapes. If you think of it, unless cannabal-like in a vegetarian way we stand in the garden and eat food still planted in the ground, we eat food of the dead. Not for the dead, but of the dead. It lies in its little crypt in my fridge waiting to be eaten. The chicken, chicken no more, is on its way to immortality, for a while, if to transpose Hamlet, " thus a chicken can go through the guts of a beggar to feed a king." All the food is dead before I cook it. Through cooking we have a rebirth, no stake through the chicken to keep it down.

My Tim Burton dinner is approaching garish associations, better stop. But I kind of like the idea anyway, a goth dinner, maybe with candles and black lace.

Back to garlic. I do love garlic and have said I would rather do without chocolate than garlic, onions, tomatoes and coffee. My mirepoix would suffer without garlic. My temper would remain if I could not smash the hell out of a clove of garlic with my chef knife. My home would never smell of baking cakes or cookies, I am not a sweet and comfy cook. But it does smell of garlic, immolated in great olive oil, throw in the onions, and pour on the wine to deglaze. I would rather cook garlic anyway.

There is no better gift to give a chef than food things and very sharp knives. I have in my covetous possession great, large, firm, garlic from Gilroy, the Mecca of garlic. Not this spurious "who raised it" garlic import from China. Not my dessicated and tortured garlic from the old back yard, suffocated by bad soil. No, this garlic is lush, plump, and redolent. Good gifts taste better than those foraged or bought.

So tonight I am making the famed 40 cloves of garlic chicken. Forty, count 'em, fourty cloves, denuded of their skins will rest inside a chicken. And it is no longer a food for the dead. GArlic brings things to life, it ressurects, it will perfume the chicken like frankensense on a mummy and create a great sauce when deglazed with some white Burgandy. I'll use some toasted garlic on the corn, and slivered garlic with French baby radishes in the arugula salad. I won't put essence of garlic on my breasts or pulsepoints but I will know that the home smells great. Opening, inviting, no garlic around the neck to repel some intimacy, and the sheer joy of planning the meal.