Garlic Bread

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In writing about Caesar salad, my mind as well as my cutting board went to a related achievement of the American table: garlic bread. Nary a pizzeria or Saturday night red-sauce joint in the country doesn’t serve it de facto. We rightly associate that napkin-lined basket of grilled, garlicky bread with spaghetti and meatballs and a candle in a chianti bottle, for all three equally inhabit a unique niche in American cooking. As with meatballs and candlelight, garlic bread is not inauthentically Italian, but garlic bread as yanks know and crave it is an Italian-American dish. From a simple viewpoint, garlic bread is a bruschetta, a grilled or baked bread topped with savory ingredients such as tomatoes and herbs that pizza is also fundamentally an expression of. But, as with pizza, that’s also an oversimplification. Pizza is its own distinct food, with a recipe and technique for the dough specific to the preparation, and a known culinary history. Garlic bread meets the definition of a bruschetta, but it is just different enough to merit its own distinction.

Both bread and garlic are two of humanity’s oldest foods. We have baked bread for as long as we’ve had a hearth, thousands of years. Along with the wheat that goes into the bread, if humanity has ever had a friend that feeds us from the fields, it is garlic. We started cultivating garlic thousands of years ago, in Asia and the middle east, as both a medicinal and culinary plant. Garlic is primary to many world cuisines, and is probably outranked only by salt or water as the single ingredient most shared among world cooking.

Garlic is notably associated with the cooking of the Mediterranean, and of that, noticeably with Italian cooking, though not at the intensity that we associate with Italian-American cooking. Italian cooking is much more complex anthropologically than one may think. Partly it goes back to the Holy Roman Empire. Garlic was a kitchen staple throughout the empire, important both for the legendary feasts of the aristocracy and the daily diet of the plebes. However, Caesar’s empire covered a vast territory from its locus in Rome to the modern middle east, northern Africa, and most of modern Europe. Caesar’s army had to eat, so among the skills deployed in a deployment was baking bread on a centurion’s shield. That bread was split open to be eaten on its own, with cheese if there was any, or a topping of vegetables mashed with the mortar and pestle into a spread flavored with herbs. One of those herbs was garlic, of which a spread was made by grinding garlic bulbs with salt. Add an anchovy and some olives and you have tapenade; add pungent herbs and tomato and you have a precursor to chermoula. And by spreading garlic paste on bread, you have an ur version of garlic bread.

Garlic bread appeared on the modern table as part of the same generous aesthetic that believes that pasta is naked unless it's drowning in sauce. By the mid-century, bruschetta had been de-italicized and de-Italianicized in American restaurants as garlic bread, served out of baskets as assimilationist expression of the American practice of having bread on the table at every meal. That practice gave us raisin toast and biscuits at breakfast, soft rolls for our tuna salad at lunchtime, slices of white bread on the table for Sunday Supper roast chicken or weeknight pork chops, and it gives us garlic bread. Our forebears made their mistakes culturally and otherwise, but at least they weren't phobic about carbs.

My vow, as yet held up, to eat healthier this year notwithstanding, garlic bread is one of my favorite foods. It is definitely one of my comfort foods, occupying the same office as a pint of ice cream or a double order of fries for others during down times. But as someone with clinical depression, I don't associate garlic bread with sadness; to me, it is one of the happiest of foods. What's not to love about slices of crusty bread, rubbed with garlic and herbs, and drenched in butter or olive oil? I always try to keep a roll of the compound butter for garlic bread in the fridge. When the mood or need strikes, I let it soften enough to be spreadable and fire up the oven. As soon as that heavenly fragrance fills the kitchen of warm bread and blonding garlic, I know I am about to be linked with ancient ancestors in the grateful smile of being fed by the simple, satisfying combination of bread and garlic.

Garlic Bread

1 loaf crusty bread, such as baguette or ciabatta

1 8-ounce stick unsalted butter

1 head garlic

1 teaspoon Italian seasoning

2 or 3 stems fresh pungent herbs, such as rosemary and oregano

red pepper flakes

grated Parmesan

salt

extra-virgin olive oil

Make the compound butter

• Remove the cloves from the head of garlic. Peel, halve, and pith the cloves.
• Unwrap the butter and place it into a small saucepan.
• Use a garlic press to press the garlic cloves into the pan containing the butter. Use all the cloves except small, green, or brown cloves. The mixture will be pungent; that is okay.
• Add the Italian seasoning, a shake of red pepper flakes, and a dash of salt to the garlic-butter mixture.
• Heat the mixture gently, stirring gently but constantly, just until the butter has melted.
• As soon as the butter has melted, turn off the burner.
• Cover the pan and let sit for 5 minutes.
• After 5 minutes, gently pour the butter into a freezer proof container with a tight fitting lid. Use a small silicon spatula to get all of the garlic butter into the container.
• Freeze the compound butter until ready to use.

Make the bread

• Remove the compound butter and allow to thaw until spreadable, approximately 1 hour countertop of overnight in refrigerator.
• Turn the oven to 450 degrees F. 
• Place a piece of aluminum foil, shiny side up, along the length of a rimmed cookie sheet. Drizzle the foil with a 2-count of extra virgin olive oil. Use a pastry brush to cover the surface of the foil with the oil.
• Safely use a bread knife to split the bread into top and bottom halves lengthwise. Cut the top and bottom half of the bread into half crossways to form quarters, and again if it's a large loaf to form eighths.
• Use a silicon spatula to generously spread each quarter/eighth of bread with garlic butter.
• Place the garlic bread, buttered side up and spaced apart, on the oiled surface of the aluminum foil on the cookie sheet.
• Sprinkle the buttered surface of each garlic bread with a dusting of grated Parmesan. If using, strip a few leaves of fresh herb onto the buttered surface of each garlic bread.
• Drizzle each garlic bread with a light swirl of extra-virgin olive oil.

Bake and serve the bread

• Place the pan containing the garlic bread in the oven. Bake at 450 degrees F until the edges are crusty and the bread is very fragrant, approximately 10 minutes.
• Safely remove the bread from the oven. Safely use tongs to transfer the bread to a bread basket lined with a cloth napkin.
• Serve immediately.

Resources

Caesar Salad

Compound Butters

Cutting Boards and Knives