he who controls the spice controls the universe

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a home where garlic was one of the four basic food groups. My Russian/Eastern European Jewish-descended ex grew up in a spice-free zone. It's no wonder that he fell head over heels for me when I introduced him to the world of garlic via Thai and Indian food. To this day, we both consider the smell of garlic slapping us — hard — across the face as the true measure of a good Italian restaurant.

Eat, Memory: The Sixth Sense
Growing up I dreamed of garlic the way some dream of bright city lights. I had smelled the forbidden vegetable (spice? herb?) during brief trips to Manhattan, roasted garlic coating the poorer sections of town, clinging to the peeling fire escapes, pouring down the tenement stoops to sucker-punch me in the nose, my 10-year-old mind reeling with flavor and summertime heat and the still inchoate idea that sex could somehow be linked with the digestive process (cf. "Seinfeld").

Back home in sedated Little Neck, Queens, we feasted on Russian, or I should say, Soviet, cuisine. Breakfast was a plate of roasted buckwheat groats with a puddle of butter soaking up the middle. Supper was a plate of thick, salty farmer cheese, sometimes with a can of peaches dumped on it, sometimes not. Around 3 p.m., a piece of boiled meat and some kind of wan vegetable were beaten into submission. "Please," I begged my mother. "If you let me eat only half a plate of buckwheat groats, I'll vacuum the whole house tomorrow. If we skip the farmer cheese, I'll give you back part of my allowance. I'll be supernice to Grandmother. Please, Mama, don't feed me."

I can't really blame my parents. They had spent the first half of their lives in the Soviet Union. They were doing their best. Roasted buckwheat was meant to ensure a beautiful, healthy organism. The nightly dose of farmer cheese was supposed to make you grow tall and strong. (I am 5-foot-6 on a good day.) Canned peaches were a sultry American luxury to be enjoyed at the end of a long working day. What was a form of punishment for me was for my parents a delicacy.

My first hint that food could be edible came at my grandmother's house. My grandmother loved me more than I loved myself, and on the occasions when I came to stay at her house after school, this love was expressed through a five-hour gorging process.

And still it wasn't enough. The specter of garlic haunted me. I tried to name my need but could not. We lived in a Russian bland-food zone, where a visiting carne asada burrito would be promptly strip-searched and deported.

I found what I was looking for one winter break from college in the early 90's at the corner of Horatio and Greenwich Streets. Against the genteel streetscape of redbrick town houses, the aroma of garlic, fresh, strong, unadulterated garlic, was weaving itself into the strands of my long hippie ponytail.

[M]y own tongue, barren for so long, accursed by the meager diet of my upbringing, was finally activated, letting the round strands of pure garlic dissolve in my mouth and making me feel, for the first time in my life, not like a dutybound Russian immigrant and future earner but like a lusty, ravenous animal looking for satisfaction. I wanted to tell my companions that I loved them. I wanted to tell them that I was happy at last. I was not merely my parents' son but my own man, and although several more years of confinement at the Midwestern college remained, I would return to New York one day and take what was mine.