Digging through my many and nefarious cookbooks after signing off last night, I have managed to find out what has happened to garlic bread!
To begin with, I had trouble finding anything in any Italian cookbook. Good reason for that: they're all post-rediscovered-Italian-from-Italy cookbooks. To find true American Italian Garlic Bread, I was going to have to look elsewhere.
Sure enough, I found a recipe in the Good Housekeeping Cook Book of 1942, a copy of which my father gave to me. Good start, involving butter or margarine, peeled cloves of garlic, a long loaf of French bread, and grated Parmesan cheese. Plus paprika, for color. This suggested that I search through some of the cooking history books I have on hand.
The big clue as to what has happened to Garlic Bread came from Sylvia Lovegren's Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads,where on page 173 she states that "Garlic bread was an important adjunct to Spaghetti Suppers in the Forties, but only in the Fifties did it come into it's proper and very popular role as a barbecue side dish."
Say what? Have we been misplacing garlic bread? Or has it relocated itself?
Sure enough, I've been finding traditional Italian-American garlic bread recipes in the barbecue books. The guru of Barbecue, Steve Raichlen, includes a couple of recipes in his opus The Barbecue! Bible.
Raichlen calls for a loaf of French bread, cut crosswise into 4 equal pieces, then lenghwise. For the spread, he takes a half cup of olive oil or butter (I can see the sense in using a combo, for flavor purposes), four minced cloves of garlic, and a teaspoon of grated lemon zest, plus some minced parsley. Generously brush the bread all over with the garlic oil, and heat on a medium-high grill for two to four minutes per side.
The only part of the recipe that I can think of that Raichlen doesn't is freshly grated Parmesan. But this is "man-food," no exact terms, just do it and do it the way you want. It's all in the technique and the enjoyment of the end results, not in the picky little details. But isn't it great to know that traditional garlic bread still has a place in our meals, and that it's just been relocated to a different tradition?
And that (meaningful pause) is the other half of the story. (A Paul Harvey reference.)
I'm still going to have to work on the Smoke House connection.
