SC - eyeballs and rotting fish

[Phil & Susan Troy]

Heather Law wrote:

> : I posted most of your remarks to the medieval list, leaving out the
> most insulting, so as not to be the go-between in a flame war.

Insulting? Possibly a little opinionated ;  ), but I stand behind everything I
said, and thought I made it clear my contempt was aimed at people who make such
claims in an attempt to deceive, since they are either too lazy or too stupid
to research the subject before making such pronouncements. As for the people
who merely have heard such statements all their lives and have had no exposure
to a dissenting viewpoint, they can't help it, can they? But yes, you were
probably right to edit the more inflammatory stuff, no matter how true it is.

> I got a
> response from another member of the list and his permission to pass this
> on if I really wanted to.
> Caroline Richenda
>   From: "C. Liang" <cliang at carleton.edu>
>     To:
>         Heather Law <lynnx at mc.net>
>
> Interesting post RE: the current discussion on Apicius.  I wish I
> had time to go home and do a throrough delve of some of the translations
> and secondary material I have to short up some of my memory on such
> cooking subjects (the new Madeliene Kamman behemoth has a long chapter
> on
> her take of the history of cooking).
>
> The only nit I had with your post was "Anyone who refers to the
> wholesale eating of eyeballs of any kind (especially of such a small and
> not especially prevalent creature as a lark) is talking through his or
> her wimple. Eyeballs have been eaten, but not as a general rule, and the
> recipe sources available from the Classical or Medieval sources fail to
> document it as any kind of widespread habit."  I would have qualified
> the
> statement a bit.  As far as I know, your statements are definitely true
> for what we know of Western cooking habits. I'm not sure that there has
> ever been a good survey of what might have normal in the Eastern /
> Byzantine empire, given its strong Arabic and Asiatic influences.  It's
> fairly common to eat fish whole (including the head, where the eyeballs
> are sometimes considered the most "tasty" part) in parts of Asia.  I
> imagine that, in the West, smaller game birds that retained their heads
> may also have been eaten in a similar manner.

Yes, I agree, and I thought the word "wholesale" was an adequate qualifier,
sufficient to distinguish between eating the eyes of an animal being eaten
anyway, such as ortolan, fish, or even clams, and a big ol' dish of eyeball
stew. I don't recall eyeballs being mentioned in Anthimus' Letter to Theodoric
of the Franks, BTW. This is a 6th century Byzantine physician's medical advice
on a regimen for good health, almost entirely based on diet. I would think a
reference would be made to eyeballs if they were considered good food by either
the Franks or the Byzantines, or even if they were not recommended for human
consumption.

> Now, if you mean that people were unlikely to commonly make a dish
> that required digging out eyeballs and eating them *separately* from the
> animal that produced them, I'd agree with you.  It strikes me as
> something that might be served on occasion during a banquet, where
> labor-intensive dishes could carry certain cachet

Yup. I have somewhere (probably in Schwabe's "Unmentionable Cuisine") a recipe
for stuffed eyeballs. I believe it's Arabic, but I have no reason to assume it
is period. Plenty of foods high in the yuck factor have been conceived
post-period, as evidence the much-and-rightly-maligned Twinkie.

BTW, for the record, the question of whether eyeballs were eaten in the cuisine
of the ancient Romans really has little or nothing to do with the claim that
Romans ate eyeball soup seasoned with rotting fish sauce: since they appear not
to have eaten them at all, except perhaps incidentally as mentioned above,
their method of preparation is irrelevant.

Adamantius
______________________________________
Phil & Susan Troy
troy at asan.com


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