Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

FISH-SAUCES—MACKEREL'S BEARD 213The various sauces known in Latin are too numerous torecite. The 1 two best, although the authorities are far fromunanimous, seem to have been made out of the gills andentrails of the Mackerel and Tunny. The components of onerecipe justify Robinson. In addition to other odds and ends,its outstanding feature was the gore and entrails of the Tunny,crammed in a vessel hermetically closed, and only drawn offwhen decomposition was complete ! No wonder Plato theComedian complains ..." drenching them in putrid garumthey will suffocate me."Alec, like garum, once the name of a fish (possibly theanchovy), came to signify only the sauce made from it, andsubsequently from other cheap fish. It differed from garumchiefly from being thicker, and judging from the recipesprobably nastier. You took first the dregs and faeculenceremaining after the garum liquor had been decanted : tothem, add turbid brine, sodden bodies of the fish, etc., andthen you have the semi-solid compound, from which alec wasderived, not inaptly yclept " Putrilago." 2If, as Badham (p. 69) asserts but not convincingly, garuma double duty served, as a sauce and as a liqueur, the price ofthe latter was exorbitant, over £3 a gallon. ^102) in" Expirantis adhuc scombri de sanguine primoAccipe fastosum, munera cara, garum,"Martial [Ep., XIII.calls attention to the expensive nature of his present, for1 Pauly-Winowa, Real-Enc, VII. 841-9, has nine columns on the subject,ending with a bibliography !* Horace, Sat., II. 4, 73; Martial, III. 77,5; and V. 11., 94. The greatestdelicacy of all these mixtures, the so-called Garum Sociorunt, exported allover the Empire from Carteia, New Carthage, etc., was compounded of theintestines of the Spanish Mackerel. The absence of beard in the Mackerel isaccounted for by this fish being convicted of treason against the reigningMonarch, and condemned to perpetual loss of beard. Keller, op. cit., 326,omits a reference to this Fischeprozess, but cites the habit of writers—especiallyBucolic—explaining any natural curiosity by putting into poetic or othershape a legend or Volkslied dealing with the point, e.g. ^sop's fable why theCamel lacks horns.3 Pliny, XXXI. 43: "singulis milibus nummum permutantibus congiosinfinitum, sicuti garum ad colorem mulsi veteris, adeoque suavitatem dilutum,fere binos." Ibid., 44 : " transiit deinde in luxuriam creveruntque genera adut bibi possit." Cf. Martial, Ep., XIII. 82. 2 :" Nobile nunc sitio luxuriosagarum, and CaeliusAurelianus " {De Chronicis, II.; De Para/ysi), on the liquorextracted from the Scomber.