Garlic
| Garlic | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Allium sativum, known as garlic, from William Woodville, Medical Botany, 1793. | |
Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Plantae |
| Clade: | Tracheophytes |
| Clade: | Angiosperms |
| Clade: | Monocots |
| Order: | Asparagales |
| Family: | Amaryllidaceae |
| Subfamily: | Allioideae |
| Genus: | Allium |
| Species: | A. sativum |
| Binomial name | |
| Allium sativum L. | |
| Synonyms | |
Garlic (Allium sativum) is a species in the onion genus, Allium. Its close relatives include the onion, shallot, leek, chive, and Chinese onion. It is native to Central Asia and northeastern Iran and has long been a common seasoning worldwide, with a history of several thousand years of human consumption and use. It was known to ancient Egyptians and has been used as both a food flavoring and a traditional medicine. China produces some 80% of the world's supply of garlic.
History
Culinary
Numerous cuneiform records show that garlic has been cultivated in Mesopotamia for at least 4,000 years. The use of garlic in China and Egypt also dates back thousands of years. Well-preserved garlic was found in the tomb of Tutankhamun (c. 1325 BC). It was consumed by ancient Greek and Roman soldiers, sailors, and rural classes (Virgil, Eclogues ii. 11), and, according to Pliny the Elder (Natural History xix. 32), by the African peasantry. Garlic was placed by the ancient Greeks on the piles of stones at crossroads, as a supper for Hecate (Theophrastus, Characters, The Superstitious Man).
Garlic was rare in traditional English cuisine (though it is said to have been grown in England before 1548) but has been a common ingredient in Mediterranean Europe. Translations of the c. 1300 Assize of Weights and Measures, an English statute generally dated to the 13th century, indicate a passage as dealing with standardized units of garlic production, sale, and taxation — the hundred of 15 ropes of 15 heads each– but the Latin version of the text may refer to herring rather than garlic.
Medicinal
In his Natural History, Pliny gives a list of scenarios in which garlic was considered beneficial (N.H. xx. 23). Galen, writing in the second century, eulogized Garlic as the "rustic's theriac" (cure-all) (see F. Adams' Paulus Aegineta, p. 99). Avicenna, in The Canon of Medicine (1025), recommends garlic for the treatment of a wide variety of ailments including arthritis, snake and insect bites, parasites, chronic cough, and as antibiotic for infectious diseases. Alexander Neckam, a writer of the 12th century (see Wright's edition of his works, p. 473, 1863), discussed it as a palliative for the heat of the sun in field labor. In the 17th century, Thomas Sydenham valued it as an application in confluent smallpox, and William Cullen's Materia Medica of 1789 found some dropsies cured by it alone.
| This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. |