SC - Isicia ex sphondylis

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Uduido at aol.com wrote:
> The recipe fpr Isicia ex Sponddylis occurs right after Isicia de Cerebellis
> (Brain Sausage), Book II. Other notes: Sch. sfon dilis; G.V. sphondylis;
> List. spongiolis Acording to Listor this is a dish of mushrooms. He is
> wrong....etc.
> 
> Hope this helps.
> 
> Lord Ras

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhh!

Noooooooow I know which one you mean. For those who haven't been
following this rather odd thread, we last left our hero, a Roman seafood
dumpling with an indentity crisis, in the hands of two different
translators from Apicius. Vehling, a copy of whose book Lord Ras has
been working with, translates the term Isicia ex Sphondylis as meaning
rissoles or meatballs of scallops. Lord Ras invited me to compare his
adaptation of the recipe to my copy of Apicius, which is a side-by-side
Latin/English version by Flower and Rosenbaum. I told him of scallop
rissole recipes I could find none, but just as a comparison, there is
this mussel rissole recipe which looks pretty similar.

I have determined, after much introspection, that the explanation here
is a simple one: I am stupid.

I've been staring at the blasted thing for weeks now, and it didn't hit
me until now that the recipe for mussels IS the recipe for scallops. For
some reason, the Vehling text translates "sphondylis" as scallops, while
the Flower and Rosenbaum text uses mussels. Whether this is the result
of an actual academic, translator's dispute/discrepancy, or whether
Vehling decided, in the spirit of his time, that mussels were RIGHT OUT
for anyone with pretensions of an educated palate, as a crude vulgarism,
I can't say. Possibly he is right, and Flower and Rosenbaum
mistranslated, since they can't both be correct. Although they could
be...;  )

Evidently what we know is that sphondylis are some type of bivalve
shellfish. There are some other shellfish, and animals in general, whose
identity we aren't perfectly familiar with, once they make it out of
Apicius' Latin and into English. Just what is a squillfish, anyway?
Well, it's some kinda vagulely lobsterish thing, like a langouste or a
sea crayfish, or a slipper lobster, or a lobsterette, or a scampi, which
is really only a Dublin Bay Prawn...see what I mean?

Anyway, I thought perhaps people might like to get a look at the Flower
/ Rosenbaum translation of the same recipe Lord Ras was working with...

"II.6 Rissoles of mussels. Boil the mussels, pound and remove sinews,
then pound them with boiled spelt-grits and eggs, pepper and liquamen.
Make rissoles from this with pine-kernels and pepper. Stuff in sausage
skin, grill, pour over oenegarum, and serve as rissoles."

Liquamen is the ubiquitous Roman fish sauce, along the lines of anchovy
essence or one of the many different Southeast Asian fish sauces.
Despite what you may have heard, Worcestershire sauce is NOT a good
substitute, and neither is soy sauce.

Oenegarum is a mixture of wine and liquamen, garum being, effectively,
another name for liquamen.

It's also kinda interesting that Flower and Rosenbaum choose "sausage
skin" as a translation for "omentum", which is, as Lord Ras states, caul
fat. It's a pretty reasonable assumption that if they are formed, and
then wrapped in this membrane, that the wrapper is in the form of a
sheet, and probably not a tube.

Ah, well... .

Adamantius
______________________________________
Phil & Susan Troy
troy at asan.com
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