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Italian Shepherd's Garlic
In fascist Italy, shepherds are so poor they subsist on snacks of bread stuffed with roasted garlic. A dozen garlic heads are baked whole with their jackets on, in an oily bonfire of olive twigs and then spread on hunks of hearth bread or stuffed between slices. Since cooking takes the strong taste and high spirit out of all onions, this is even more harmless than a Raw Garlic Sandwich, which consists of sliced garlic cloves on bread moistened with olive oil.
But heads of garlic, raw and whole, are snacks in themselves in peasant sections, where they're chomped down just like apples, and we see no reason why not.
The method is barely a method: whole garlic heads cooked until soft, then squeezed onto bread. A few details from the original need translating for a kitchen without a bonfire.
- "Jackets on"Leave the papery skins intact and the head whole; they steam the cloves and keep them from scorching. Slicing the top off the head, or wrapping in foil with a little oil, does the same job over coals.
- Fire versus ovenAn "oily bonfire of olive twigs" is a hot, fast, smoky fire. Indoors, 400F for 40 to 55 minutes gives the same result: cloves collapsing to a paste when pressed. Over embers, bury the heads at the edge of the fire, not in the flame, and turn them a few times.
- Twelve heads is a lotA dozen heads roasted will yield roughly a cup of paste, enough for eight to twelve open sandwiches. Roast three or four if you are cooking for two; roasted heads keep several days in the refrigerator, and should not be stored covered in oil at room temperature.
- Judging donenessRoasted garlic should be the colour of light caramel and give no resistance at all. Pulled too early it is still sharp and slightly raw at the centre; taken too far it turns bitter and dries into the skin.
- The claim about cookingHeat does convert the pungent sulphur compounds in garlic to milder ones, so roasted garlic really is sweeter than raw. It is not odourless, and the difference between roasted and raw here is one of degree, not kind.
- Hearth breadWhat the recipe wants is a coarse, chewy, open-crumbed loaf with a hard crust, of the pane di campagna type. A sturdy sourdough or ciabatta works; sliced sandwich bread collapses under the paste.
- SeasoningThe original specifies olive oil only for the raw version. Salt and a thread of good olive oil over the spread paste are a natural addition, and neither contradicts the dish.
The phrase "fascist Italy" places this entry in the period between Mussolini's rise in 1922 and the fall of the regime in 1943, and the framing tells you as much about American attitudes as about Italian shepherds: garlic was still, in the interwar United States, a marker of poverty and of immigrant kitchens, something a book of this kind could present as a daring novelty rather than a staple. The dish itself is older than the politics attached to it. Bread spread or rubbed with garlic and oil, cooked over the same fire that baked the bread, is common across the Italian south, and is of a piece with what is now sold as bruschetta; the whole heads roasted in embers are simply the fire doing the work of a pan. The closing remark about peasants eating raw heads like apples is the kind of traveller's observation that appears often in period writing and should be read as colour rather than as documentation.