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Garlic Paste
Slice four or six cloves of garlic, and pound them in a mortar, moistening them occasionally with olive-oil until they form a smooth mass. Put the mixture into jars, cover with clarified butter, and keep in a cool place. This composition, commonly called agoli, is used for flavouring dishes with garlic. Time, about half an hour. Probable cost, 3d. or 4d. Sufficient, a little taken on the point of a knife will flavour a pint of gravy.
This is a garlic-in-oil preserve sealed under fat and held at ambient temperature, which is one of the few genuinely dangerous procedures in Victorian cookery books. The points below explain the hazard and decode the period detail.
- The hinge: garlic under oil is a botulism vehicleRaw garlic carries Clostridium botulinum spores from the soil. Suspended in oil and then sealed beneath clarified butter, the paste is oxygen-free, low-acid and at a temperature the spores are happy with, which is precisely the combination that allows toxin production. Chopped garlic in oil has been the cause of documented botulism outbreaks and is why commercial versions are acidified or refrigerated with a short dated life.
- "A cool place" is not refrigerationA Victorian larder or cellar in summer would have been well above modern refrigeration temperatures, and warm enough for the organism to grow. The butter cap makes matters worse rather than better by excluding air. Nothing in the method heats the mixture at any point.
- No acid, no salt, no measured cureThere is no vinegar, lemon, salt or any other hurdle in the formula. The keeping quality is entirely the fat seal, which is a barrier to mould and drying, not to anaerobic bacteria. Toxin is also odourless and tasteless, so a spoiled jar gives no warning.
- Make it fresh insteadGarlic pounded with oil is worth having, but as something made for the meal and used the same day. For any keeping preparation, follow a current tested recipe with specified acidification and storage.
- "Agoli"The book's spelling of aioli. Many versions of the Provencal sauce are emulsified with egg yolk to a mayonnaise thickness, though garlic-and-oil versions without egg also exist; this is the plainer paste, meant as a flavouring rather than a sauce.
- Cost and quantity"3d. or 4d." is three or four old pence, a pre-decimal price of no modern use beyond showing how cheap garlic was. Four or six cloves make only a very small quantity of paste, consistent with a preparation dosed by the knife-point.
- Mortar versus machineThe half-hour presumably covers the pounding. A mortar gives a different, generally smoother texture than a blade grinder, and coarse salt used as an abrasive shortens the work considerably.
Cassell's treats garlic paste as a store-cupboard flavouring on the same footing as anchovy essence or mushroom ketchup, to be dosed by the knife-point into gravies. The wariness is characteristic: nineteenth-century English cookery treated garlic as a strong foreign seasoning to be measured out rather than a vegetable to be eaten, and writers of the period frequently advised rubbing a cut clove round a salad bowl and no more. The name given here, "agoli", is an anglicised stab at aioli, from Provencal ai (garlic) and oli (oil), the Mediterranean emulsion that in its full form binds pounded garlic with egg yolk and olive oil. Preserving foods under a cap of clarified butter or lard was standard practice in the era before domestic refrigeration, used for potted meats and fish as well; it excludes air and mould effectively, and its serious limitation with low-acid ingredients was not understood until bacteriology caught up with the kitchen in the twentieth century.