Fish-sauce – caveat consumptor!
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My children love to slosh tomato sauce on everything, destroying any
residual taste (taste?) which their turkey dinosaurs, fish fingers and other
haute cuisine delights may once have possessed. I’m afraid the Romans were
the same, not, you understand, with tomato sauce, but with some horrendously
tasting fish sauces (I’ve tried them but I’ve just about recovered now!),
known generically as ‘garum’ and ‘liquamen’. Essentially these were the
liquid drained off fish which had been allowed to ‘ferment’ (‘rot’ in
Anglo-Saxon) for at least several
months. This sauce was then applied liberally to any number of
otherwise pleasant tasting meat and vegetable dishes. I suspect that it was really
used to disguise the taste of meat that had gone off, as I believe curry
originally was in ‘Take the entrails of a tunny fish, along with its gills, juice and
blood, and add sufficient salt. Leave it in a vessel for two months, then
pierce the vessel and allow the liquid to run off. This is garum’. Well, each to his own; however, I would suggest Lee and Perrin’s
Worcester Sauce, available in all supermarkets and grocers’, as a palatable,
even if not entirely authentic, alternative. It contains an anchovy extract,
and so is at least reasonably close. 1. Quintilla’s introductory page 3. Quintilla’s recipe for
this month. 4. Return to Quintus’ Latin Translation Service Home Page
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