Garlic: crucial ingredient in practically every savory food, or source of stinky kitchens and stinkier breath? As American literature scholar Rocco Marinaccio writes, our answers to that question have deep roots in class, race, and geography, particularly when it comes to the treatment of Italian immigrants in the United States.

Long before waves of Italian immigrants arrived in the United States, Marinaccio writes, Italians themselves connected garlic with social class. In an 1891 cookbook, Pellegrino Artusi describes ancient Romans leaving garlic “to the lower classes, while Alfonso King of Castile hated it so much he would punish anyone who appeared in his court with even a hint of it on his breath.”