Author: Ryleigh Nucilli / Source: Atlas Obscura
For the 16th-century Italian noble, garlic posed a unique, culinary dilemma. To demonstrate status, a person of taste and means served food prepared with the finest, rarest spices, such as saffron, cinnamon, cloves, and ginger.
Common ingredients were to be avoided, and garlic was neither rare nor fine. But it was delicious. So what was a noble lord or lady to do?In order to have their garlic and eat it too, aristocrats’ chefs devised a loophole: ingredient “ennobling.” To make garlic and other stigmatized ingredients socially acceptable, they paired garlic with richer, more patrician foodstuffs: meats, expensive spices, and aged cheeses. These, through mere proximity, performed a sort of gastronomic alchemy that enabled garlic to shed the stench of poverty and appear on nobles’ tables.
In Renaissance-era Italian society, what you ate was intimately linked to social status. This is evident in the gratuitous use of saffron, the most expensive spice in the world, in the cookbooks of the wealthy. This link is also illustrated in literature from the period, which uses nicknames rooted in aromatic vegetables to refer to the lower classes, conflating the people with what they ate: “onion eaters” and “fava bean eaters” and “garlic eaters.”
In his collection of short stories from the late 15th century, Novelle Porretane, Renaissance man Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti includes the story of a valet, who, unhappy with his social position, asks his lord to knight him. The lord, a man of breeding who understands the unchangeable, cosmic nature of social hierarchy, tries to explain the impossibility of his request. But the valet persists. So, the lord proves his point with garlic. In what turns out to be a farcical knighting ceremony, the lord presents the valet with a crest that has:
…an azure background [with] a hand sprinkling salt on a head of garlic … in the place of the crested helm, there was a very beautiful woman, representing Virtue, holding her nose and covering her mouth to show that she was disgusted by the smell of garlic.
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