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Pantry · Aromatics

Garlic

The clove that starts more ComidaTime pots than any other aromatic — smashed, sliced, or left whole in oil.

Allium sativum · Also called garlic cloves, garlic clove, whole head garlic · From The kitchens that still write this name in a recipe line

Garlic as it appears in a working ComidaTime pantry.

The journey

Garlic is a aromatic with a route. The kitchens that still write this name in a recipe line. Cooks carried the name because a pot without it tasted like a different country.

The corpus names it in 890 recipes across 30 ComidaTime kitchens, including American, Argentine, and West African. This page keeps the jar next to the hearths that still reach for it.

Public-domain botanical plate of ginger and kitchen aromatics from Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen, 1887.
Franz Eugen Köhler, Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen (1887) · Public domain. Source

In the kitchen

In 30 ComidaTime kitchens, including American, Argentine, and West African, Garlic is not decoration. Add it where the recipe puts it: early if it needs fat and time, late if it is perfume.

A smashed clove in cold oil, warmed slowly, is a different ingredient from browned chips. The books use both. Burn it and start over.

Healers and the table

Home kitchens treated Garlic as food that changed a meal — appetite, warmth, or a settled stomach — the way families talk about a jar, not a clinic.

Garlic on a table is supper. Traditional talk around it is not medical advice.

Traditional uses are part of the story of this spice. They are not medical advice.

Used in these ComidaTime kitchens