"stinking rose" news and stories

Garlic. Is it possible to even conceive of Italian cuisine without the pungent bulb? We've all experienced bad garlic, usually in the form of cloves that have been browned to death in oil and are ladled on top of the dishes at family-style Italian pasta mills. I swear those places much have a huge vat of this "garlic" prepped in advance daily. I'm all for banning that type of garlic, which would certainly never be found in the kitchen of a real Italian chef. Only the fresh stuff will do. Or will it?

There's a garlic debate raging among chefs and eaters in Italy, and it's not about freshness. It's about eliminating garlic from Italian cooking entirely. Sicilian chef Filippo La Mantia, who has a hot restaurant in Rome, declared that he'll never use it. Like others in his camp, he feels that garlic smells terrible and overwhelms delicate flavors. The antigarlic contigency has a powerful ally in former Premier Silvio Berlusconi whose has a well-known aversion to the stinking rose. Carlo Rossella, a news director for Berlusconi's Mediaset has even started a list of garlic-free restaurants and is pushing for places that serve garlic to have separate, garlic-free menus.

I'm not holding my garlic breath with worry over the stinking rose vanishing from Italian menus, though. Italians ate 108 million pounds of garlic in 2006, up 4.3 percent from the previous year, according to farm group Coldiretti.

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