Archived from http://www.latin.fsbusiness.co.uk/liquamen.htm at Quintus’ Latin Translation Service
Fish-sauce – caveat
consumptor!
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 India; this must have been a constant
problem in the Italian summer. If you really want to try garum, here’s
a recipe:
‘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