A Provencal recipe that I have taught for years in my classes is chicken braised with 40 cloves of garlic. While this may sound like an incredible amount, the long slow cooking reduces the cloves to a butter-soft smoothness and a delicate flavor that has to be tasted to be believed. Along with the chicken you eat the garlic spread on bread like butter, and one day it occurred to me that it would be a smart idea to make a pureé of garlic and keep it on hand as a flavoring for stews and sautés, to mix into vegetables or a salad dressing, or to serve on toast as an hors d’oeuvre. On another occasion, I made a sublime sauce for roast lamb by combining equal quantities of the garlic pureé and créme fraîche, combined with some of the degreased lamb pan juices and a little seasoning.