This week on Lunchbox Envy. It wards off not just mosquitoes and vampires, but also Ringo Starr, who is allergic to it. It was used to embalm the dead in ancient Egypt. And it was used as an antiseptic in the First World War. This week we're sniffing around garlic! Hello and welcome to Lunchbox Envy, a QI podcast that fills your brain as well as your stomach. My name's Jack and I'm joined by fellow QI elf Manu. Hey Manu. Hey Jack.
Yes, we both write for the TV show Cute Eye, digging up obscure facts and trivia on every topic imaginable. That's right. And also with us is Rosie McKean, who is a professional chef. food writer, food stylist and all-round gastronomic expert. Hey Rosie, how you doing? Hello everybody, it's garlicky good to be here. I was really trying for a garlic pun and I was like, it's not coming. There's no words that sound like garlic.
so we've each got our lunch boxes in front of us and we're going to take it in turns to reveal which unusual and interesting garlicky dish we've brought for lunch But before we dig in, let's talk a little bit about garlic. Is it one of the most pervasive flavours in cooking? I feel like it might be because it's kind of in every culture, in multiple dishes like bread, butter, rice, chutney, curries, pasta dishes.
I even found out recently that you can get garlic ice cream. No way. So technically you could have it for every single course. Oh my god. Which I would love. Who... do we think produces so makes the most garlic are you looking for a nation here or a person because if i'm looking for who eats the most garlic okay oh oh my god let's do let's do a sweet steak
quiz let's do a quiz why is money involved i'm gonna say spain okay um i think just sheer scale it's gonna be china damn it i forgot about scale is bang on. God damn it. 76% of the world's supply of garlic. That might be more than all other countries combined then. I mean that is by definition. More than all other countries combined.
Okay, let's crack on then. Right, it's time for the first lunchbox. I've got a garlic-infused chocolate bar. Can I just say, uh... red flags all over the shop with that i don't like this it's not appealing to me well i'm not sure if it was meant to be appealing but it was meant to be deceiving so it was invented in the 1940s by special operatives for the british secret service as it was known as at the time soe special operations executive
And they were concerned that they were dropping agents into Spain and France and that they wouldn't be convinced as locals because they hadn't eaten enough garlic. So they dropped them in with garlic infused chocolate bars to make their breath authentically French.
That is so... weird isn't that weird and also incorrect like it's not true they don't eat that much garlic well it was true at the time because actually britain viewed garlic as quite suspicious and we didn't touch the stuff to be honest in the 40s at least it was quite rare and
that's why it took elizabeth david the 20th century food writer who brought mediterranean cooking to britain basically to come along and say no no guys it's good stuff um and it's actually uh it's mocked by shakespeare wow In Elizabethan times, a garlic eater was an insult and it was used to be something exotic or foreign or actually quite working class. It was quite a classist insult. Can I just ask, why didn't they just eat garlic?
I think, again, because it was used for medicine rather than actual gastronomy. So they just had to bury it in something that a British secret agent would use. But surely you'd taste it. That's so much worse than eating, say... delicious garlic bread or i don't know if garlic bread had been invented or possibly just not known to be british but also if you're sending an operative into a foreign state
Wouldn't you want them to sort of be okay with sitting down and eating a bowl of aioli? A good prep for that is to just give them some aioli. They're like, no, no, I won't have the garlic prawns. And then they whip out their chocolate bar. Do you have a Snickers bar by any chance? I will suck my garlic in that.
anyway i got this from peter taylor who wrote a fantastic book called weird war two uh where he lists all the sort of weird things that went on as the world or europe at least was gearing up for a massive war that killed many people but this is the lighthouse side of it
And I also, having Googled chocolate and garlic, there is one recipe online for chocolate coated garlic. And they say you can use raw, but it's much better to use fermented. And they swear that all of their family members enjoyed it. Anyway. Shall we try it? No. Manu, we've got to. We've got to prove that this is bad. I haven't actually got the 1940s. It's not 80 years old, okay? Thank God. I've made my own.
So I bought some chocolate and I melted it and chopped some garlic and mixed it all in. So it does whiff. Oh my God, that's so much worse than I thought it was going to be. Oh, that's bad. It's two flavours I love so much and hate together so much. They just don't work, do they?
I mean, I think it's not as bad as I thought it was gonna be. Dark chocolate is the only acceptable chocolate for this, I think, because it is savory enough and toasty enough. I still can't believe that this is... what they landed on as how to get people to eat garlic before they went to the war surprising isn't it it's just so weird to us right now to imagine that britain was so skeptical of garlic
it was used as medicine so people again like same with olive oil my dad said his mum could only get olive oil in pharmacy because it was used for clearing your ears out so roman naturalist pliny the elder who was around about 2 000 years ago in his 37 volume natural history a series of books meant to gather all the knowledge in the known world listed garlic as specific for 61 different afflictions
Among them scorpion bites, tapeworms and epilepsy. And also an aphrodisiac, which I think seems kind of counterintuitive because... It's so stinky. It's so stinky. Yeah. But is it stinky if you've got that? Do you not think, though, that if both of you have eaten garlic, it kind of cancels itself out? not to be getting down to some very rude things, but if I am kissing someone who has garlicky breath and I also have garlicky breath, I...
Either don't worry about it or I can't even really tell because my own breath is overpowering theirs. It's habituation. Yeah, it's like nose blindness. over time i think that's what it's called when you get used to a certain smile say if yeah everyone's eating loads of garlic or you're in a room say lush
There's another one. Really? And you're in like a really smelly soap shop and you're like, how do you work here? My brain hurts standing next to this thing. And they're like, we can't smell anything. I mean, garlic is... like allicin is great for you like physically so it makes sense that it would be in the whole medicinal foods and aphrodisiacs because it's like an antioxidant antibacterial i think the kind of person that would eat that much garlic would probably be healthier
like more fecund what is that wow great use of fecund yeah it's also an indian asian medicine and philosophy it's like a hot food heat generating energy like sexual whatever at certain times of your life it's like oh it's okay to eat these foods
But apparently when you're a bit older, it's like, you shouldn't be eating the sexy foods anymore. No garlic for you. Oh, poor old, old people. They always get such a rough deal. Roman soldiers were fed so much garlic in order to keep them strong and healthy. uh that the phrase may you not eat garlic meant may you not be called up to the army a nice phrase well obviously in the original latin
I'm not going to try and replicate. So mess hall Roman chefs were roasting up mice and guinea pigs and stuff with so much garlic that they were literally stinking. So you could probably smell them coming. Smell them coming, yeah. Well...
I read that ninjas didn't eat garlic at all when they knew they were going to be, you know, ninja-ing. Sneaking up on people, that's so clever. Yes, because they didn't want to sneak up on people and then be able to smell them on the wind. I wonder what food... are completely odorless and exciting because now i'm thinking about it most of my favorite foods are quite smelly and make a terrible ninja i did read that scientists discovered that
the best way to get rid of garlic breath the thing that worked best was apple slices but not just any apple slices apple slices that have been browned Because the thing that makes them brown, they suddenly release a chemical that's quite good at neutralising allicin. Oh, that's so interesting. So if you can see it coming, if you're going to be prepared, you should chop up an apple 20 minutes before you eat garlic. That's perfect. On that sexy date night. Yeah.
Between garlic courses and coitus, just have a plate of brown apple ready to go. Coitus and feckens. What a day. My bingo card's being filled quite quickly here. Just to add to the sexy garlic dinner foods, apparently if you drink milk before you eat garlic, it's supposed to help neutralize the garlic breath smell. So you drink your pint of milk. Then you chop up your brown apple. Then you eat your garlic. And by that stage, the fizz has gone out of your romantic encounter. It's fermented.
Time for delve into our second lunchbox and that's Rosie's what have you brought today? I have gone with something that's loved the world over. I have made some garlic bread. I was hoping you'd say that. There's a couple of talking points around garlic bread that I wanted to bring up. Firstly, garlic bread typically is made with a garlic butter, as we know. In the garlic butter...
you will find a green herb it is usually parsley am i wrong yeah i'm interested by that basically i was doing a bit of research on this because i just put garlic and parsley together i was like why do we do that and it's a very mediterranean you know european thing yeah one reason why historically people have paired garlic and parsley together is that parsley contains polyphenols which in theory break down the sulfuric compounds of garlic and make it less strong tasting and less like
Harsh on the bread. Basically, that just means that it's a really classic pairing. Yeah, it's symbiotic. I would argue that there are some other herbs we could be using. So I have made two types of garlic bread. One with parsley and one with...
a different herb oh and i'd love for you to tell me oh yeah i feel like i got this this is great and we can test our breath in half an hour and see which one has had more of an effect i please can i not have to test anyone's breath oh wow that also can i just say this might be the most beautiful looking garlic bread I have ever seen. It's mostly green. It's mostly green. Lots of parsley. This is round two. So this is a different herb that I think actually is such a beautiful pairing with garlic.
Can I say what I think this is now? Yes. Coriander. It is coriander. It's banging. It's so good. It's so good. It's much mellower. Coriander tastes more lemony when you use it with garlic. and has like a fight with the garlic in a way like it's it's ready it's a marriage yeah a marriage sometimes involves fighting which one did you prefer coriander or the parsley hands down parsley
It's just childhood nostalgia garlic bread memory. And you've made it beautifully. I did prefer the parsley one because it tasted more garlicky. But you're right, the coriander adds a sort of lemony... flavour. Yeah. I think perhaps... A coriander garlic butter is better on the correct bread. Oh, yes. For example, a naan, where you expect to find it right. Whereas the parsley, I actually think it offers nothing other than green. Yeah.
It does let the garlic sing its song. Exactly. As it were. One of the things I've pondered throughout my life is people, they'll see, oh, add two cloves of garlic in the recipe and they'll add like six. And it's partly because they're garlic. That's me. But is there any other ingredient that you can get away with that? Or do you think they're not getting away with that? Do you think they just love the taste of garlic and they're just overpowering? I think they aren't getting away with it.
We're recipe writers. We aren't writing a recipe for no good reason. Yeah, you've done your research. It's perfect with that amount of garlic and thank you very much. I think you're right. I actually remember there was a story on Weakest Link. One of the contestants said that they made pasta for the first time and they'd never followed a recipe and they mistook cloves for bulbs.
So they put four bulbs of garlic in their pasta and it was inedible. It was so funny. I've remembered that forever. That would have taken forever to peel and chop. Yeah, I imagine, yeah. Interesting, I read the other day, you can now buy single clove garlic. So the whole bottle was just one big clove. Yeah. But then I would argue that that's not quite answering a problem, like solving a problem, if you know what I mean. Because...
If those cloves are really big, then it's really equivalent to two to three cloves. I've seen them. I've seen them in the wild. Have you? In the wilds of Borough Market. And they are, I don't think, equivalent to just one clove of garlic. It's at least two to three. So there's sort of a medium, a middle ground. There's smaller than a bulb. For me, I'm suspicious. I'm much more interested in the garlic, the newly invented hybrid vegetable.
by a chef in America whose name is escaping me now. Oh, I know. It was Dan Barber at Blue Hill Stone Barns, the very famous, very like elitist.
restaurant in america he has a farm where he grows all of his own veg and you know it's all very bucolic and whatever but he's developed this garlic managed to crossbreed garlic and leeks and obviously they're the same family they're both alliums so i'm sure it wasn't that hard they put them in a room together they talk to each other turn on the barry white turn on the barry white seconds later it was done and is it sorry is it a leak on the top
I was going to say, what does it look like? Leak on the top. I don't know why that made me want to sing that. But like, I think it looks like a sort of thin leak, like a bit like a three-cornered leak.
But yeah, I guess that to me feels like a more interesting and cool thing than just one clove of woody, gross garlic. I agree. It's a cool name to start with. Like, it is a great... pun very well done i'm impressed he's fathered the garlic he's fathered the garlic and he gets to take that to his grave and i think that's quite cool
Do you have a tried and tested best way to peel garlic without wanting to kill someone afterwards? So I use my knife to slice off the dry foot, at the same time slightly move the clove of garlic so that... bottom piece of skin closest to the board comes off with the foot. Yeah, so you've opened it, so then you can just peel the rest of it off. You've also got to bash the clove.
very lightly with your knife to loosen the skin as well i heard this but also bashing it releases all the allicin which um is usually it's designed i think it's designed designed i'm an agnostic here but you know um the reason garlic is so pungent is because it's a chemical that wards off pests and predators that want to like eat their plant so
It responds much better to being crushed than being sliced because the cells suffer. If you can imagine your arm being crushed under a heavy weight, it would cause a lot more damage than a surgical saw that goes right through because the ricochet effect, the ripple.
goes through all the cells so they all rupture and they all release their allicin whereas if you get a sharp knife through the middle of it it actually only damages quite a few cells but that's we use that in cooking right so i will always slice garlic when i want a more mellow flavor
and I will always bash it, make it a paste with it, with salt or whatever, when I want it to be really strong or grating, like with a microplane. I really hate, I really hate, I mean like, sorry, who invented a fucking garlic crusher? That is a dumb ass. I'm so happy you brought this up. We've talked so much about garlic. They are so stupid. It's so much wasted. So fiddly. In that tiny. And it's impossible to clean. And it's hard to use. 100%.
Elizabeth Davian actually complained about this in the 50s. She was like, the English use of a garlic crusher is so silly. It takes mere seconds to bash it with a knife. When my husband uses like a lemon squeezer, kind of like similar to a garlic crusher, but bigger. I'm always like, are you all right?
Feeling a bit tired, why are you? Just simply couldn't do it with my hand. Like, why are you using that? What a waste of a machine. How emasculating. But actually, I did then use it the other day to make some cocktails, and I will say it didn't help. It's so much of that. But...
Anyway, back to garlic crushers. Waste of time. Use a microplane. That's my favorite. Can you explain what a microplane is? A microplane is a fine handheld grater. So not like a box grater, which you'd grate a block of cheddar on. It's a... handheld things probably what you'd grate nutmeg or stuff like that and you can buy them in varying different thicknesses or blade sharpnesses i love them not spawn others are available another great microplane
We are, again, not sponsored by my campaign. You can get them for your feet. What? Like literal branded. Yes, they use them in the pedigures. Yeah, it's mad, but they're like specifically. But it looks exactly the same as a garlic grater. Do you know the story of Microplane? Because they used to make printers. So they were a laser cutting company and they would make these printer parts with their lasers out of the metal.
And then people were always coming back from the machines with like heavily bleeding fingers. So they like used up all their plaster budget for the year. And then they're like. These are really sharp, but they don't need to be sharp, but they're coming out sharp because of the tools we used to make them. So then they just pivoted. They were like, maybe we could grate cheese with them. And then they've made way more money making cheese graters than they have making printer parts.
Oh, that's a good story, you know. It was good. I enjoyed it. Thank you. Sorry, that sounded really sincere. That did sound really sincere. I am being sincere. Wow, thanks, Rosie. It's a pleasure to have you. I found out the other day that you can actually use garlic as glue. It's that sticky. Yeah, when you break it down and you release the allicin, it is really, really clingy. And yeah, you can repair broken glass or broken porcelain with just the garlic allicin.
Doesn't that make it stink, though? Probably. You wouldn't want your pint glass made. Is it heatproof after that? You know what? Probably not. But for a bit. We're picking it apart, Manny. Well, it's already broken. Yeah. But that does make sense, because when you grate garlic...
it can feel really sticky on your fingers, right? I always was told that when you have things like garlic or chili... or heavy spices on your fingers you should never wash your hands in hot water because the hot water makes your pores open and therefore it all stays in there whereas if you wash your hands with cold water it's easier to get it out yeah it's actually
interesting you bring it up because the science behind getting the garlic smell off the sticky allicin is still really complicated and no one knows exactly why it stays on your hands so much but they have looked into like because a lot of like wives tales about oh this definitely works like tomato juice coffee toothpaste all of these things are supposed to get this sticky allison like sulfur smell off your hands
That's why the only thing that they've proven works a bit is the stainless steel trick. Have you ever heard about rubbing? Oh, yeah. Oh. Yeah, rubbing your hands. I've done that for years. No, you haven't. Yeah, I do. My mum taught me. I remember learning to do that as a child. Really? I've never heard that before. They sell special bars of stainless steel. Rub it on something metal. I've got so much stainless steel in my kitchen. Rub yourself.
So that doesn't mean I have to bin my Aesop hand soap. It kind of helps the allicin molecules loosen them and makes it easier to wash off afterwards. So it's not instead of, it's as well as. You know what the real problem as well is garlic. on boards on like chopping boards or i now have a separate fruit board because i've just so traumatized i'm eating like sliced fruit that someone's cut up for me and it tastes like garlic the garlic apple the garlic yeah the garlic pineapple
Pineapple and mango are terrible for it. You can always taste. Well, this is why in professional kitchens you can't use wooden boards. It's like a big no-no. You can't. Because they cling on to so much. But I'm sure we've done in the past on QI that they're actually more sanitary. because plastic boards get grooves much easier and then when you wash them the bacteria in the grooves stay in the grooves whereas with the wood
You can still get grooves, but they seal up because the wood warps and changes. So then you seal the bacteria in and they die. But then to sort of counter what you're saying, the wood warps and then it changes shape, especially in the high heat dishwashers that professional kitchens would use. And then... you're chopping on like a wobbly board and then you cut your finger off and then lawsuit city and then you're back to square one with the hygiene there's blood everywhere
So, on to our final lunchbox, and that's Manny's. What have you brought for us, Manny? In my lunchbox today is some garlic clove skin. Okay, famously the inedible parts of the garlic. Yeah, I'm on a diet now. Just before we started our recording, I crushed a garlic clove and I rubbed it on my foot. There.
All the cool kids are doing it. So I rubbed it on my foot and I put my foot in a plastic Ziploc. Oh my God, is it still there? Yes, it is still there. It's in a plastic bag and crushed. It's like some sort of torture device. Yeah, it looks like something out of CSI. So sorry, can I ask why have you done this to yourself? Basically, allicin, that kind of sulfuric compound in garlic that Jack was talking about earlier.
That can travel through your skin into your bloodstream and come out of your mouth. uh like on your breath because it it's so good at penetrating uh yeah into you it stays in your blood yeah so one of the confusing things about all of the tastings we've done and the smelling of garlic is like i throughout the record Thank you.
will have just been like breathing out garlic anyway so i haven't been able to taste that much of the garliciness because it's already in my mouth like about this worked yeah about 10 minutes into our recording i was going like wow um but i can't say i think that
happened to me before but i didn't know that that was what was happening where i like for tv shows we'd have to peel like loads of garlic for whoever was working on camera and i remember just always being like yeah i can taste garlic but i hadn't eaten any garlic
There was such a sheer quantity of it. That is wild. It is, man. And that's, when I was researching the brown apple thing, if you want to get rid of garlic breath, no amount of tooth brushing will do the job because it's in your bloodstream. It's already infusing you. Yeah.
Oh my God. You know how people like sleepovers would put someone's hand in a glass and make them wee themselves. Maybe the new thing is going to be like, take their foot up with some garlic and they'll go insane being like, I don't eat any garlic. Why do I taste garlic? drives someone slowly mad yeah also when you were talking about the aphrodisiac-y bit not you see that's not a sexy thing
I wonder if there is a garlic fetish. If it was an aphrodisiac, you'd see garlic flavoured condoms, wouldn't you? Oh my God, Jack. Well, would you bloody believe it? They do actually make garlic condoms. No way. There's this restaurant in San Francisco where they basically, it's like. Is that the Stinking Rose? The Stinking Rose. I've heard of it. In San Francisco. They season garlic with food. Like it's a garlic restaurant. They use shitloads of garlic. Two and a half thousand.
tons a month wait no that's wrong 1.5 tons you're like that student couple where you missed it close the old notes there it uses 1.5 tons of garlic a month anyway
They sell as much garlic condoms. No way, of course they do. That's so funny. I actually, Jay Rayner has a story, food critic and broadcaster Jay Rayner. He said... he was in the taxi i think he'd he'd been to california for a conference or something and he'd gone to the stinking rose and he was in the taxi two days later back to the airport and the driver said have you been to the stinking rose then because it was on his breath it was so infused another way uh
the flavor can get into your system if you're not rubbing it on your feet like i have just done in utero so in the womb yeah if you are pregnant and you eat lots of garlic you're more likely to have a baby that likes the flavor of garlic too. No way. Because what you eat, some foods, it kind of flavors the taste of your amniotic fluid. And then your baby's like, nom, nom, nom. And the more it's used to the garlic flavor.
the more it will kind of prefer that tastes after it's been bought. Wow. It's the same with carrots and kale as well. Oh my God, that is such a hack to not having a fussy child. Yeah, no, that's exactly the point is to like encourage mothers to eat lots of... different foods when they're pregnant because you're less likely to have a fussy eater. That must be why I'm always craving cheap vodka and cigarettes.
So that's it for this edition of Lunchbox Envy. And we'll leave you with an apt definition. Fizigumai means a person who's aroused by garlic. Damn right. If you want to get in contact with us, we're on socials at lunchboxenvypod or you can email lunchboxenvy at qi.com. And Rosie, you've actually got a book out, haven't you? I do. It's called Good Time Cooking. And it is available in all good bookstores. And it is a dinner party Bible. You are welcome. See you next time. Goodbye. Goodbye. Bye.
Lunchbox Envy was hosted by Manu Enrio, Rosie McKean and the Jack Chambers. The producer was Alex Bell. This has been a quite interesting podcast.