Monday, June 16, 2008

Garlic Scapes
I’ve never understood garlic scapes. Well, I shouldn’t say “never.” After all, who in these parts ever even heard of garlic scapes until fairly recently. Can it be as long as 10 years? Fifteen? I suppose in California, where the vast majority of domestic garlic is grown in Gilroy, they’ve known about garlic scapes forever.

Raise your hand if you know what I am talking about. Don’t be embarrassed if you don’t. Garlic scapes are still pretty recherché.

Garlic itself is a bulb that grows underground. But that you know. In spring, it sends up green leaves that look like onion greens or scallion greens or, on the smallest scale, chives, all of which are cousins of garlic. In the case of chives, we eat the greens and the bulb is inconsequential. In the case of garlic, we eat the bulb and the leaves are inconsequential; that is, unless you’re the crafty type who wants to make garlic braids.

Eventually, in mid-Spring – right now -- the garlic bulb, or more accurately the cluster of bulbs (or cloves, in culinary terms) that we call garlic -- sends up a green shoot that is not a leaf. This shaft or stem is long, green, firm, and it curls, ending in a bulbous white portion that would wind up a seed pod if left to mature. This stalk is the scape, from the Latin, scapus, meaning “shaft” or “stem” (I looked this up). Good farmers cut off the scape before it matures. If left on, it will eventually straighten out and turn the color of garlic. The bulbous portion will be filled with seeds. And all along, in order to mature into a seed pod, it will be sapping the energy of the plant. Therefore, when it is cut off, the garlic grows bigger.

Instead of dumping the scapes in the compost pile, farmers found a way to make a little extra money selling them to customers on the look out for something different, people who have to be at the cutting edge, or, in any case, like to eat weirdo foods. In essence, garlic scapes are the result of encouraging local farming.

In no time, trendy chefs were putting garlic scapes on their menus, and it wasn’t long before recipes for garlic scape pesto made the rounds on the internet. Exotic food!? Americans are hungry for it. Garlic scapes!? What part of the garlic is that?

Truly, you can’t blame a guy for wanting to make an extra buck, especially an underpaid, undervalued family farmer. And I am all for waste-not/want-not, but I was not climbing on the garlic scape bandwagon. They taste just like garlic. They are garlic, but fibrous. Very chewy; too chewy for me and I’m a guy who doesn’t mind chewing. By the way, that’s why garlic scape pesto -- pre-masticated garlic scapes, so to speak – has become the most popular way to prepare them.

But I now have a new take on garlic scapes. They have come up in my research of the food of Molise, the small southern Italian region that is tucked between Puglia to its south, Abruzzo to its north, and Campania to its west. On the east is the Adriatic Sea.

A rule of the world, a rule of nature, is that you eat what you have. One of the causes of Western culture obesity – obesity is no longer a problem only in the U.S -- is that we have everything, and too much of everything. In old Molise, it appears, they had nothing. They had so little to eat, it was so poor, the land gave so little, that you were only one step higher on the food chain than the sheep and goats that you tended. You ate garlic scapes.

This is the true Cucina Povera, the old “poor cuisine” or “poor kitchen” of southern Italy, much of it based on foraged greens.

I found a recipe for a garlic scapes and eggs in a – wait till you hear this – a cookbook that presents the food of the Croatian community in Molise. A friend, Anton Angelich, who is a proud Croatian, told me about this Croatian community. It dates from the same period, the early 1500s, as the various Albanian-Southern Italian communities. Both Catholic groups were escaping the Ottoman Turks who were pushing west to the Adriatic Sea and converting everyone in their path to Islam. Molise is just across the sea from Croatia. Anton got this cookbook for me through a friend of his in Zagreb. Besides being fabulously esoteric – I mean, folks, the cuisine of a 500-year-old Croatian community in Italy -- this cookbook is a total gem. The text is in Croatian and the Croatian-Molise dialect that is understandably a dying language. But the recipes are in both Croatian and Italian. So I can read the recipes, and they are very well written. Modern. Specific. And every recipe is accompanied by a photo of the food and the cook who made it, mostly mamas and grandmas, but a couple of men, too. I want to eat in the kitchen of every last one of them. I take that back. There’s one woman who looks like she’d chop your head off without flinching. Appropriately, her recipe is for bitter greens.

Anyway, in this book, there is a recipe for “Topi d’aiglio,” which literally translated means “mice (or rats) of garlic.” It’s not an appetizing thought, but scapes do, indeed, look like rats’ tails. In the directions for this recipe, which is essentially scrambled eggs with scapes, the scapes are, in Italian, “scapi” (the plural). Italian is from Latin, after all. Now: Just a couple of weeks ago, in a more mainstream book on la cucina molisana, I came across a recipe for scallion greens, colorfully called “scallion tails,” code di cippollini, cooked into an egg white omelet. Gotta be related recipes, I thought. Maybe one day I’ll get to the bottom of it. It’s probably just the old rule of the world, of nature: You eat what you have.

I’ve made the scallion green-egg white frittata a few times now. It’s not something you’d necessarily go out of your way to eat, but it’s good, and better than wasting scallion greens. Surely, old Molise cooks had some worthwhile use for the egg yolks. Certainly, no poor person would ever waste an egg yolk. Eggs are a major source of protein in la cucina povera.

Meanwhile, back in my kitchen, following the Croat-Molisana recipe, I cut off the tapered tail of the scapes. They never tenderize, And I boiled the rest of the garlic scapes to tenderize them, something that I never bothered to try. (Duh!) Naturally, when you are reduced to eating things like garlic scapes, as were the Molisani, you learn how to cook them. The recipe said to cook them for 10 minutes. I stopped at five. After that time they were tender enough -- the texture of a well-cooked (not overcooked or undercooked) green bean (stringbean) -- and they had a subtle garlic flavor, as opposed to the aggressive pungency of raw garlic. It was almost sweet, like long-cooked whole garlic cloves.

After boiling and draining, I cut the scapes into 1/4-inch pieces, sautéed them in a no-stick skillet for less than a minute in a tiny bit of olive oil, the pour on some beaten eggs and made scrambled eggs. It was a very nice breakfast. Next time, I am going to elevate the dish slightly out of its impoverished past, and add some grated cheese to the eggs, as anyone would these days.