SC - Did they really eat that?

[Phil & Susan Troy]

Micaylah wrote:

> >Adamantius (who will be happy to explode with derision and abuse on the subject
> >of people who believe the Romans ate rotting fish sauce, given an excuse, but
> >needs to set some parameters first)
>
> So I say...
> Go for it!
>
> M.

Awwwwww, maaa-aaan! I wish you hadn't done that. Now I have to be mean...

I was waiting to find out if the original forwarded post was the words of the
original postor, or what she found on the Mediev-L list. I guess people are
assuming that was the forwarded quote. I wish there had been more detail...

All right, here goes.

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'm being conservative, here. For practical
purposes it seems to have been virtually nonexistent, but I'm sure someone could
come up with one exception as a refutation of my claim (no, wait, she's at
Pennsic). Anyway, while I won't say it never happened, but there appear to be no
recipes in any of the better-known European sources such as Apicius, Taillevent,
etc., and little or nothing in the way of literary references.

Statements like the one about lark's eyes in rotting fish sauce (BTW, if this is a
reference to Roman cookery, the first thing that comes to mind is that there seems
to be not a single recognizable soup recipe in Apicius -- porridges and purees,
yes, but of stock-based soups, none I can recall) are made because the speaker is
looking for ways to support the idea that medieval or other unfamiliar food is
disgusting. There is really little or no evidence to support this idea. I submit as
evidence that jerks like this invariably refer to garum or liquamen as "rotten",
rather than pickled, salted, or even fermented. It's kind of like saying modern
American food is a travesty because they take dead cows and smash them up into a
puree, fry slabs of this gunk, top it with decayed milk, and eat it between chunks
of baked rotten grain paste. Except in my example Americans actually do eat
cheeseburgers on occasion, while lark's eye soup with rotten fish sauce has never,
as far as I know, been eaten by anyone, and certainly not on a repeated basis, so
it is vastly unfair to characterize any cuisine anywhere on earth or in any time
period in this way.

If period cookery were a person this claim would come very close to slander, as it
is both untrue and specifically designed to damage and mislead. It is therefore
more than merely inaccurate; it is a lie. The fact that it is perpetuated by the
ignorant who don't know better makes it no less a lie.

Now, here's how that rotten fish sauce works. Herring, mackerel, tuna, and the
other oily fish generally used to make garum swim in some pretty cold waters. They
have extra powerful digestive enzymes, because cold is not normally conducive to
the chemical reactions found in digestion. Take such fish out of the water and
allow them to warm up even a bit, and they will very quickly begin to digest
themselves from the inside out. Ever eat a shrimp that disintegrated in your mouth
into a sort of creamy paste? Same principle. The taste is pretty much the same, and
it is not harmfully bacteria-ridden, it's just unpleasant, mostly because it's the
last texture in the world you expect from a shrimp. Same for lobsters that have
been allowed to die more than a couple of minutes before cooking.

Now, in order to prevent harmful bacteria from growing on these fish, our friends
the Romans, as well as various cultures in the Far East, determined that salt would
keep the fish from rotting while it broke down enzymatically. The fact that the
quick  "boiled" recipe for garum contains no acid of any kind would suggest that it
was not pickled by the action of lactobacilli in the salt/sun version of the
recipe. Things like sauerkraut, dill pickles, and corned beef have an acid tang in
spite of the fact that they are brine-pickled, not vinegar pickled. If one wanted
to make artifical garum taste like it was pickled through salt and lactobacilli,
something like vinegar could easily be added in the quick cooked recipe, but it
seems not to have been done. Ergo I suspect Roman garum was not produced by
bacterial action of any kind.

There are _some_ fish sauces found in Southeast Asia that are now made using
anchovy essence and vinegar, rather than using the old traditional methods of
layering under pressure with salt and sunshine. I would suspect in those cases the
fish did bacterially ferment while liquifying. Even those, however, are fermented
by harmless, and even helpful, bacteria, and are not by any stretch of the
imagination, rotten.

Okay, so I guess by now many of you patient listfolk are headed for the porcelain
altar. Sorry about that. Oh, one more thing...why do this in the first place?
Because garum provides a stable source of certain nutrients that would otherwise
have been in dangerously short supply in the available diets of the cultures who
made the stuff. (Vitamin E comes to mind, but I'm sure there are others, as well as
several minerals and some unsaturated fat). And, it actually tastes pretty good,
too. Several million Vietnamese can't be wrong...;  )

The bottom line here is that the original speaker is looking (and in the wrong
places) for things he can find wrong with whatever cuisine/time-period he is
talking about (it wasn't made clear which), rather than actually bothering to learn
something about his chosen subject, examine the existing evidence, and make a fair
judgment based on it. I find the claim both stupid and offensive, and I'm prepared
to take a chance and guess that description applies equally to the person making
the claim.

There now, Micaylah...aren't ya glad you asked???

Adamantius, the Mean and Grouchy (TM)
______________________________________
Phil & Susan Troy
troy at asan.com


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