Origins: Garlic Bread
From Ancient Rome to the local pizza joint
With 1 in 8 restaurants in America being ‘Italian’, it’s safe to say that Italian cuisine has conquered the world. However, go to many of these restaurants and you’re likely to find a lot of the same things: spaghetti and meatballs, pizza and, perhaps most infamously, for Italians, ‘garlic bread’. How did this latter dish become such a classic as to be famous the world over? Who were the originators of one of the world’s favourite appetizers?
Mist of time
It should be stated right out the gate that garlic bread is not Italian. The frozen, garlicky baguette-style loaves we find in the freezer sections of our grocery stores bear about as much resemblance to Italian cuisine as the tubs of ‘Italian hard cheese’ just a few isles over.
How then did it become so associated with Italy? Tracing the origins of garlic bread requires us to understand what ‘preceded’ it, though many of us still eat this today, often alongside garlic bread — Bruschetta.
It’s unclear who created bruschetta, though it is inseparably associated with Italy. The name comes from the verb ‘brusciare’ meaning ‘to burn’ or more accurately in this case ‘to toast’. Bread was certainly known to the Etruscans — who lived primarily in what is today Tuscany, before the…
