ajlo

Two syllables and a diphthong. AJ-lo. The aj is one sound, the vowel of English "eye", and then the l starts the second syllable. It is not a-i-lo and it is not the French ail, which has no l sound left in it at all. If you have already met ajn and fajro, you have the sound.

The sibling of cepo, and the relation is literal. Botanically garlic is Allium sativum and the onion is Allium cepa: the same genus, and ReVo lists ajlo as the name of that whole genus as well as of the one plant. So when the cepo page at rank 2,671 called garlic its close relative, that was taxonomy rather than a turn of phrase. The two words behave as a pair in the kitchen for the same reason they do in the ground. Their wild cousin is ursajlo, bear-garlic, the wild garlic that carpets European woods in spring - a compound you can read at sight.

How the kitchen uses it. A whole head is ajlokapo or bulbo de ajlo, one clove is ajlero with the -er- suffix for a single particle of a mass, and crushed garlic is pistita ajlo. Ajla as an adjective does the rest: ajla pano, ajla sauco. The register is squarely kuirarto, which arrives three ranks earlier in this same band, and if you are working through the food vocabulary these two belong in the same sitting.

And yes, the vampires. Esperanto literature has the same joke as everybody else: ajlo forpelas vampirojn, garlic drives off vampires. The folklore is Balkan and the word for the creature is vampiro, borrowed by every European language from Serbian in the eighteenth century. Since this stretch of the course also brings in the full moon, you may as well have the whole cupboard at once - though ajlo will do rather more for your soup than for your safety.