Garlic Wars!

June 20, 2007
Celebrities kick up a stink over garlic in their pasta
Richard Owen in Rome

Gourmets, chefs and celebrities are engaged in garlic wars over a campaign to banish it from Italian cuisine.

Garlic – properly known as Allium sativum– has long been central to the famed Mediterranean diet. It is also said to have health-giving properties, acting as a natural antibiotic and helping to prevent heart disease, high blood pressure, the common cold and even cancer.

However, Carlo Rossella, a prominent television executive, announced a campaign yesterday to persuade Italian restaurants not to use “stinking garlic” in their dishes. Rossella – news editor of Canale 5, one of the three commercial networks owned by Silvio Berlusconi, the media tycoon and former Prime Minister – said that he was compiling a food guide recommending only restaurants that banned garlic.

“Garlic stinks, I can’t digest it and I avoid it like a vampire,” Rossella declared in Il Foglio, a newspaper owned by Mr Berlusconi’s wife, the former actress Veronica Lario. He said that many people were allergic to garlic, which caused stomach upsets.

Mr Berlusconi himself is known to dislike garlic and in the past has issued breath fresheners to officials and electoral candidates of his Forza Italia party if he smelt so much as a whiff of garlic on their breath.

The anti-garlic campaign is backed by showbusiness luminaries such as the actors Monica Bellucci and Raoul Bova; top businessmen such as Luca Cordero Di Montezemolo, chairman of Fiat and head of Confindustria, the Italian CBI, and Marco Tronchetti Provera, the head of Pirelli; as well as by Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio, the Environment Minister and leader of the Green Party.

The restaurants of the top three luxury hotels in Rome – the Eden, the Hassler and the Hilton – offer garlic-free food, as do some of the best dining spots in the city. Paola Micara, owner of La Barchetta, said that she had put a sign up in the kitchen stating “No garlic!” as a reminder to staff.

Rossella said that it was easier to find garlic-free food in northern Italy than in the south. Cooking without garlic in Calabria or Sicily was almost unthinkable, although some restaurants in Naples or Capri would make dishes without garlic if asked in advance, he said.

Defenders of garlic point out that it has been used in Italian cooking since Roman times, when Pliny the Elder offered a list of its benefits in his Natural History. Antonello Colonna, a leading Rome chef, dismissed cooking without garlic as just a passing fad. “I’ve even put garlic into dishes at official dinners for Berlusconi without him realising,” Mr Colonna said.

“The secret is in how you use it. You must never fry it – you crush it, and then boil it so it’s digestible.” He added: “Garlic is king in the Italian kitchen. Getting rid of it is like making do without violins in a great orchestra.”