In the windows of Italian-American restaurants or pizza parlors, big chains of garlic hang from the ceiling. It gives an old Italian market feeling, as if the chef will come out and pluck a head or two of garlic from the chain. In America, garlic and Italian food are a no-brainer hand-in-hand combination and no other dish showcases this relationship quite like garlic bread. Crusty on the outside, soft on the inside, and encased with loads of garlic-laden butter, garlic bread is the ultimate side to have alongside classic Italian-American dishes. Yet if you go over to Italy, garlic isn’t a standard, in fact, it’s quite subdued in the Italian culinary landscape. So how did we get the garlic-rich bread we all love? Did it derive from Italy or the US?
Garlic bread is Italian– sort of. Revitalizing stale bread with heat and fat can be traced back to Italy as well, but just not in the same way as you might think. In Ancient Rome, stale bread was revitalized by frying it in olive oil, yet the garlic didn’t make it into the picture. While there are some indications that Ancient Romans cooked with garlic, it wasn’t in the same volume or fervor as we do today. Garlic was more of a medicinal item applied on skin wounds or chewed as a way to increase energy, strength, or stamina.
After the reign of the Roman Empire, Italy was divided with its garlic use. In the north, garlic was sparingly or even seldomly used, while in the south, it was used quite frequently. In the culinary world, where there is warm weather, there is garlic, lining up with this Italian culinary divide. Fresh garlic’s antibacterial properties have been a way to decrease foodborne illness, and for many has been a way to mask unpleasant tastes or smells.
The turn of the 19th century saw an influx of Italians to the US, specifically from the southern regions. With the arrival of immigrants came an ever-increasing stream of Italian cuisine, with some heavy adaptations. Italian-American restaurants and pizza parlors catered initially to fellow Italian immigrants, but as time passed, owners expanded their reach by Americanizing some of the food to bring in a broader audience. Whether it be a fellow immigrant Italian or an American, restaurants faced issues of sourcing ingredients. While areas like New York or Chicago had easier access to imports, not everything could be remade like it could in the old country.
Ingredients were different and in some cases altered to make it affordable. The fried stale bread of Italy (called bruschetta) was altered into what we’d call garlic bread today. The crouton-like bread was gradually replaced with soft American French-style baguettes, and the classic olive oil was replaced with the more easily accessible butter. How and when this transition started or even happened is hard to pinpoint, but by the 1930s newspapers and cookbooks had recipes about garlic bread and wrote about them like they had been around for quite some time. While archival records don’t indicate garlic bread’s existence in America before the mid-1930s, the addition of garlicky foods plays into the Italian-American use of garlic in dishes. Garlic was a cheap and affordable way to amp up the flavors of chicken, pasta, and tomato sauces. The raw garlic would be mixed with butter and then smeared onto partially sliced loaves of bread, baked in foil, and served alongside the main dish as an additional feature to the menu, including dinner sets of parmigiana and spaghetti with meatballs.
The boom of garlic bread was an arch, sparking in the mid-century and waning in the late 1990s. Food manufacturers’ promotion of margarine spread used garlic bread as a marketing recipe to sell with tubs of their butter substitute. Chain restaurants and pizza parlors expanded garlic bread into the American consciousness, as it became a side to have with a salad, to dip in marinara sauce, or to sop up the excess pasta sauce.
Pizza parlors created variations of garlic bread with garlic knots as a way to use up and sell excess pizza dough, but still deliver the same quality and functions as garlic bread. A shift in eating patterns in the 1970s endorsed by the government’s new food pyramid promoted carb heavy dishes. Animal fats in the new dietary guidelines were shunned, further increasing the grain-heavy, margarine diets through the 80s and 90s where pasta with a side of bread was an A-okay low-fat dinner (given it was a-okay if it was cooked with margarine).
The heavy garlic-soaked buttery bread of Italian-American descent would almost be as American to Italy as a drive-in hamburger or lunch counter chili dog. Garlic bread is the result of a game of telephone, gradually altering and changing with the supplies available and the demands of the customers.
Gone were the brittle crusty bread scraps and in were the soft and pillowy loaves of bread. The once nutty aroma of olive was swapped in for the widely available butter, and garlic flavor was simply enhanced with more (and more) garlic flavor. However, murky its origins are, garlic bread is a comfort food that can and is eaten all on its own.