Side Kick to
a Pork Chop Breaded & Broiled
(or else, a Pasta Primo)
a Pork Chop Breaded & Broiled
(or else, a Pasta Primo)
My mother says, “Vegetables need help.” And that’s the truth. What she means by “help” is olive oil, salt, and garlic (or else onions, but that’s another blog). One of the most common preparations of vegetables in my people’s cooking is all’aglio e olio. It’s fun to say, once you’re able to. It defies the usual abhorrence for hiatus that Italian shares with English (e.g., “a apple”). Yet the phrase all'aglio e olio sandwiches two such hiatuses between lilting l’s, themselves sandwiched by vowels, and preceded by yet another lilting l and vowel. One’s tongue ends up sliding through it all with the pleasure a child takes in sliding through mud, or perhaps the pleasure an acrobat takes in his own nimbleness. But since the American tongue is not practiced in Italian acrobatics, let’s give it a name fun for us to say: Broccoli Garlicky.
This pair, garlic & oil, has the remarkable power to accentuate the specific deliciousness of many a vegetable. Its action is not like the invisible operation of salt, which educes from a food’s native potency its specific taste. Rather, garlic & oil act more like a harmonic chord, or the contrapuntal melodies of a polyphonic chant, or the jiving of a jazz back-up. Music-making was practiced for generations before the discovery of the mathematical ratios that explain harmonies, but chemistry has yet to achieve this for cookery. But I can testify with the certainty of immediate perception that garlic & oil rightly used makes vegetables taste good, each in its own way. It is a thing I wonder at, a thing I praise, not a thing I can explain. Salt brings out the flavor; garlic and oil accent it. Would you come naked to the dinner table, Gentle Reader? Would you come with only a fig-leaf to cover your humblest member? Is not the beauty of a beautiful body even better displayed well-clothed than unclothed? Then let us so adorn our vegetables as to magnify their beauty for both eye and tongue, with garlic and oil.
