Once I was making soup with a friend and the recipe called for a few cloves of garlic. She was ready to throw the garlic cloves into the soup whole without chopping them up first. I would've thought that it would make more sense to chop it up first and she had never heard of doing that.
Does anyone ever cook with whole garlic cloves? My friend's parents are from Spain so perhaps in other countries this is a common way to include garlic in a recipe.