I guess you can’t really be subtle at a festival celebrating a vegetable, even if it’s garlic. There’s got to be a few nutty things, like the garlic king. Over the main pavilion, there is an enormous floating garlic dirigible. There are plenty of old dames in crazy hats. A few sporting garlic earrings. It’s not exactly over the top, but simmering just under it. The celebration of garlic isn’t too extravagant, but it is what it is; a kitschy, exclamatory piece of Americana.
The festival is split into two main thoroughfares: traditional fried fair fare on which to feast, and a grower’s section where you can buy all manner of garlic. I decide to check out the latter. It’s less crowded. It’s quieter, and more honest. Here, you can escape the big time hustle and bustle of the Northeast’s largest garlic festival, hang out for a bit, and sample garlic. Straight garlic. No reductions, nothing fried; there are people handing out slips of garlic on toothpicks. Feeling intrepid, I go for it.
Bad move. My palette wasn’t ready for the hard stuff. Immediately regrettable. The farmers behind the counter laugh at me. When they’re done snickering, they share a word. “We’ve been coming to the festival since ’92,” says Roseanne, “and it’s awesome.”
My next sample is a dangerously spicy salsa. Ray Baehm is the purveyor, and he tells me that I should work my way up, acclimate myself to what will inevitably be the most mind blowing heat-check of my life. “You’ll know you’ve had some heat,” he tells me of his glowing orange insanity sauce, “we’ve had some mixed reactions.
The fellow next to me just tried the salsa, and his face is so squinted and sucked in that you’d think that he had a vacuum cleaner behind his lips. He promises me that it’s okay, and that I should go for it.
So I do. I do it like a champ. I load that sample chip up with enough salsa to kill a small dog, and I take a bite. For a second, it’s not bad. I can taste the sweet and resonant flavors.
Then the pain happens. That mouth-numbing pain of a flavor that isn’t really meant to be ingested. It’s not chasing the garlic well. Ray sees my staggering pain offers me a grape. I eat it, then I eat two more, then I realize that the evil pain of this evil concoction isn’t gone, and I eat another. The photographer laughs. l
