With the advent of Popular cooking shows, lifestyle channels and magazines the humble garlic bulb has become a staple Ingredient in our Kitchens. Most dishes would be bare without this core Ingredient. It is probably the only ingredient you consciously eat as you mental process who you will be meeting the following day. Nutritionist swear by the holistic qualities. As the migrant has assimilated into the Australian Culture, so has the journey for the humble garlic bulb.
Nick Diamantopoulos, who heads Australian Garlic Producers, the company that sells most of the Australian-grown product to supermarkets, tells of his Greek-born parents and many of their garlic-loving migrant friends having to be furtive about using the herb when they came to this country.
”My family tells me they would only eat it at weekends, because they couldn’t go to work in the factory [with garlic on their breath], because all the Aussies would complain about the smell. Now my parents ask me ‘what did you do to make it fashionable?’ I think it just came out of the popularity of Italian and Chinese restaurants. People wanted to cook like that at home and they needed garlic for food to taste the same.”
The time when ”the Aussies would complain about the smell” was also a time when most of what we consumed was heavily regulated and everything we read or watched was heavily censored.
Indeed, for most of Australia’s post-European-settlement history, culinary culture was mainly from the dank cluster of islands off western Europe, and generations were pathologically averse to the plant sometimes dubbed ”the stinking rose”
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