Garlic In My Socks

One winter many years ago, I took a job at a Benedictine monastery atop a windswept mountain in Vermont. Deep into this frozen season, I battled a cold that wouldn’t quit and one afternoon dragged myself into the monastery kitchen in search of a hot drink to soothe my raw throat. There, I encountered one of the monks, who took in the sorry sight of my red nose and bleary eyes. On hearing me croak out a miserable “hello,” he offered this bit of medical advice: “Put garlic in your socks.”

I opted for a hot lemonade with honey, an old family remedy. To this day, I don’t know if the monk was serious or only pulling my leg with his garlic-in-the-socks remedy, but I never waste an opportunity to pass on his advice. It’s usually good for lightening the mood when the other person is feeling like death warmed over.

Although no one in my family ever used garlic to cure a cold, an illness had to be pretty serious before we would resort to drugs. With the exception of aspirin, over-the-counter-medicine was a rare sight in my childhood home. We had hot lemonade with honey for sore throats and mint tea for stomachaches.

We were not the only ones to rely on traditional remedies. The small Vermont town where I grew up was populated with rugged farm folk who swore that the only way to survive the near-tropical summer heat was to swig copious amounts of a vile home-made brew called switsel. This concoction consisted of cider vinegar diluted with water and rendered almost, but not quite, palatable with maple syrup.

Later, when I got married, my new Iranian family had their own medicine chest (or pantry, if you will), full of home remedies. I learned entirely new “prescriptions,” like yogurt and honey for insomnia or nabat (saffron-flavored rock candy) dissolved in hot water (or tea) with a splash of arak-e nana (distilled essence of mint) for nausea.

One of my mother-in-law’s favorite remedies is a tiny yellowish brown seed called khak-e shir. She uses it to cure two birds with one stone, so to speak. Steeped in cold water, khak-e shir will treat a bout of diarrhea. Brew it in hot water and it’s a cure for constipation.

Over time, I discovered that my Iranian family and friends take the whole idea of food as medicine a giant step beyond anything I could have imagined. In Persian tradition, all foods are assigned to one of two categories: sardi (cold) and garmi (hot). This has nothing to do with temperature, but refers to the type of energy contained in the food. The idea is that a proper balance between “heating” and “cooling” foods is necessary for good health.

To complicate matters, according to this Persian philosophy, people also have these same energies, with some of us being more sardi and others more garmi. So if you’re a person with an abundance of warm energy, eating a lot of garmi foods could make you sick, or at least give you serious discomfort, such as a stomachache or heartburn. (Think of that huge chocolate fudge sundae [garmi] that made you just a bit nauseous.) Seasons can aggravate the situation, which means that eating too much garmi food in warm weather or too much sardi food when it’s cold and damp can make you feel unwell.

This philosophy goes back thousands of years to Zoroastrian times in ancient Persia, although some historians say it is based on ancient Greek medical texts. Traditional Chinese medicine, with its yin and yang, and India’s Ayurvedic practices have similar beliefs, so who knows where the idea originated.

Whether garmi/sardi began in Greece, China, India, or Persia, the 10^th-century Persian physician Abu Ali Sina (known in the West as Avicenna) was one of the first to compile a complete list of “cold” and “hot” foods. Avicenna wrote over 100 medical treatises, including his most famous compendium, the Canon of Medicine, and Iranians revere him as the “father of modern medicine.”

While I struggle to remember which foods are heating and which are cooling, my mother-in-law can rattle them off as easily as one of her favorite recipes. What helps is to remember that garmi foods are on the sweet end of the taste spectrum (peaches, cream, chicken, and eggplant), while sardi foods tend toward sour and bitter tastes and are also harder to digest (vinegar, beef, beans, kale, and hard cheeses).

All of which makes me reconsider my take on switsel. Since vinegar is cooling and Vermont summers can be sweltering, maybe there is some truth in the old-timers’ claim that their favorite summer beverage makes the heat more bearable.

As for garlic in my socks, I’m still not sold on that one. Garlic is garmi, but I can’t see how putting anything in my socks will keep me from sneezing.

Vintage Garlic

In my pantry stands a glass jar filled with what looks like tiny twigs poking out of slimy black mud. Not an appealing sight. Yet it is the most precious item in my kitchen—seer torshi (pickled garlic). Heaven on a plate.

The first time I saw the nasty-looking black mess, I eyed it with deep suspicion. Whole round bulbs of garlic, darkened with age, lying in a viscous liquid. Surely no one actually ate that and lived to tell the tale.

I sniffed the jar. It didn’t smell too bad. In fact it had a pleasant, woodsy odor, like last year’s leaves after a snow melt. One with a slightly vinegary bite. Once, the garlic had been white and the vinegar clear, but over the years it darkened to black, the papery skin covering the cloves disintegrating and thickening the liquid. It put me in mind of little mummies, their wrappings falling apart with age.

My mother-in-law explained the condiment’s origins. Her grandmother had made the seer torshi forty years earlier, and every time the family ate it, they could feel her presence with them. Sure, I thought, doesn’t everyone have some item that reinforces an emotional bond with a long-gone loved one? Usually it’s a handmade quilt or a knitted sweater, not something you're supposed to eat.

I remembered the way my mother used to can our garden’s summer bounty. Packing vegetables into jars and processing them in a hot water bath then testing the lids for a proper seal. These garlic pickles had surely never seen the inside of a canning kettle. Thanks, but no thanks.

It took me several years to work up the courage to try the seer torshi, as its age marched relentlessly on toward half a century. We serve it a couple times a year, on special occasions like Persian New Year—the perfect accompaniment to the traditional holiday meal of grilled fish and herbed rice. But for a long time, I was certain that one bite would send me directly to the emergency room. Despite concrete evidence to the contrary.

I’d watched my husband and his relatives scrape the tattered remnants of skin off the cloves, lick black vinegar from their fingers, and pop the cloves into their mouths, savoring every bite. Maybe they had developed an immunity to the microbes that had to be lurking in that murky liquid. The way that Mexicans can drink their tap water without falling victim to Montezuma’s Revenge.

It was only a matter of time before curiosity banished caution, and I tried one small clove. Just a nibble to begin with. I was hooked from the first bite. Smooth and buttery, with a mild vinegary tang on the tongue, as though most of the vinegar’s sting has evaporated over the years.

Seer torshi is easy to make; you don’t even need a recipe. Just take a gallon-sized glass jar with a tight-fitting lid and wash it thoroughly. Fill it two-thirds full of garlic bulbs, hard stems removed. You can separate the cloves, but leave the skins on or the garlic will turn to mush. Cover with vinegar and toss in a tablespoon of salt. Then cover the jar with plastic wrap for a tight seal before replacing the lid. Wait seven years and enjoy. Preferably longer because, like good wine, seer torshi only gets better with age.

As our supply of great-grandma’s pickled garlic dwindles, we serve it only at Persian New Year now. And when we sit down to the meal, it’s like the old lady is sitting beside us, smiling and murmuring noosh-e jaan. Bon appétit.

Do you have a special food tradition, recipe, or dish that brings back memories of relatives now gone?