Hey, Bill. What's a "clove" of Garlic?

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The women of our church are presently engaged in preparing for this Saturday's Valentine's Day Dinner. This event has become a staple in our list of annual fund-raising activities. Since it's inception about 7 years ago, the dinner has had an Italian theme: a variety of pasta dishes, salad, toasted garlic bread, and a number of wickedly rich desserts.

All this activity called to mind the first time I ever used garlic. I don't recall that my mother or father ever used garlic in any of the food they prepared while I was living at home. I didn't even know what pizza was until I married and moved away from home.

Anyway -- to the story.

At the time, my husband and I lived in an north Arkansas town where one of the major social events of the year was the Annual Spaghetti Supper hosted by the ladies of the local Episcopal church. The recipe for the spaghetti sauce was a closely guarded secret, and it was delicious! My next door neighbor, a local restaurant owner, declared that he could wheedle the recipe out of one of the Episcopal ladies... and he did! She dutifully pared down the ingredient quantities and presented him with a written recipe.

We had a small but close group of friends: the restauranteur and his wife, who lived next door to us, and two males who ran the most successful hairdressing establishment in town. We set aside a Sunday morning to prepare the sauce and scheduled our own spaghetti supper for that evening. Neighbor Bill said he would purchase all the ingredients required.

And so the six of us gathered on the designated morning in Bill's kitchen, each of us preparing one of the ingredients for the sauce. However, when we got to the garlic in the recipe, we had to admit that none of us had ever used garlic. The recipe called for two cloves of garlic. What's a "clove" of garlic, Bill? No idea! The recipe called for two, and he had purchased two garlics, which looked like a small onion divided into parts. We decided that we'd just use all of it. Yep! Two heads of garlic went into the sauce.

The sauce bubbled and simmered on Bill's stove all day. It smelled divine! We could hardly wait for supper time to come. At last, the pasta was cooked, the salad prepared, the wine poured and we sat down to our own version of the Episcopal ladies' spaghetti.

It was marvelous! It was delicious! It was the very best spaghetti sauce I have ever eaten in my life (still, to this day.) We were very pleased with ourselves, and probably had double helpings.

Jump forward in time now, faithful readers, to the following Wednesday.

At the time of this story, I was working as a bank teller, and since I was an experienced teller, I also was training a new employee, a very sweet woman from Georgia, who shall come back into the story in a moment. Neighbor Bill was in the habit of bringing the restaurant deposits to the bank on Wednesdays, and generally came to my teller window. When he came in on this Wednesday, he leaned into the opening and whispered "Pat, smell my breath," and puffed a little air towards me. "Do you smell any garlic? The waitresses say I stink like garlic!" I sniffed at the air and replied "No, Bill, I don't smell any garlic."

At this point, my teller trainee, who had overheard this exchange, had cracked up with laughter. As I turned to her she said in her soft Georgia drawl "Honeh, it's been awl I could due to stay in the winda with you. You defintly smell lack an Eye-talian."

It took several more days for the smell of garlic to leave our persons. After I had regained my normal sense of smell, I realized that a wool dress I had worn during the time when garlic oils were still seeping through my skin could never be worn again. Even dry cleaning couldn't remove the odor.

I still like garlic, a lot, but have learned to use it in moderation, lest I inadvertently drive those with sensitive noses into fits.

Maybe I should move to Italy.