Salt (12 page)

The French, when they first encountered this sauce, apparently forgetting their own Latin heritage, were horrified that the Vietnamese ate “rotten fish.” The Romans had encountered similar reactions. In the early twentieth century, the celebrated Institut Pasteur in Paris studied
for sixteen years, from 1914 to 1930, to understand the fermentation process that Vietnamese peasants had been employing for centuries. The two necessary ingredients were fish and salt. The fish were usually small ones of the Clupeidae family, to which herrings and sardines belong. The fish sat in salt for three days, which produced a juice, some of which was reserved to ripen in the sun, while the remainder was pressed with the fish to produce a mush. The two were then mixed together and left for three months, sometimes much longer. Then the solid parts were strained out.

T
HE ROMANS USED
garum in much the same way that the Chinese used soy sauce. Rather than sprinkling salt on a dish, a few drops of garum would be added to meat, fish, vegetables, or even fruit. The oldest cookbook still in existence,
De re coquinaria
—which is credited to Apicius, though it appears to be a compilation of a number of Roman cooks from the first century
A.D.
—gives far more recipes with garum than with salt. Garum was much more expensive than salt, but Apicius was clearly writing for the upper classes. According to Seneca, Apicius committed suicide because, having spent one tenth of a considerable fortune on his kitchen, he realized that he could not long continue in the style he had chosen.

The following recipe from Apicius is an example of the kind of elaborate molded dish that the Romans loved. It is seasoned with garum, and there is no other mention of salt in the dish.

[Place cooked] mallows, leeks, beets, or cooked cabbage sprouts, roasted thrushes and quenelles of chicken, tidbits of pork or squab, chicken, and other similar shreds of fine meats that may be available. Arrange everything in alternating layers [in a mold].

Crush pepper and lovage [a bitter herb, common as parsley in ancient Rome] with two parts old wine, one part broth [garum], one part honey and a little oil. Taste it; and when well-mixed and in due proportions put in a sauce pan and allow to heat moderately; when boiling add a pint milk in which [about eight] eggs have been dissolved; pour over [the mold and heat slowly but do not allow to boil] and when thickened serve. [The dish would usually be unmolded before serving.]

A simpler recipe using garum instead of salt is that for braised cutlets:

Place the meat in a stew pan, add one pound of broth [garum], a like quantity of oil, a trifle of honey, and thus braise.

And here is one for a fish sauce:

Sauce for roasted red mullet: pepper, lovage, rue [an aromatic evergreen], honey, pine nuts, vinegar, wine, garum, and a bit of oil. Heat and pour over the fish.

Although this style of cooking was a kind of haute cuisine for the elite, costly garum was frequently described as “putrid,” which is to say rotten. “That liquid of putrefying matter,” said Pliny. Seneca, the outspoken first-century philosopher, called it “expensive liquid of bad fish.” But his protégé, the poet Martial, apparently did not agree since he once sent garum with the note “accept this exquisite garum, a precious gift made with the first blood spilled from a living mackerel.”

But Martial was probably writing about
garum sociorum,
which means “garum among friends,” the most expensive garum, made exclusively from mackerel in Spain. Garum factories of varying standards were built on the coast not only in Roman ports such as Pompeii, but in southern Spain, the Libyan port of Leptis Magna, and in Clazomenae in Asia Minor. Since the Britons both made salt and exported fish, it is likely that England too was involved in the Roman salt fish and garum trade.

Many types of garum were made—even a kosher garum,
garum castimoniale,
for the sizable Jewish market in Roman-occupied Israel. Castimoniale, in accordance with Jewish dietary law, was guaranteed to have been made only from fish with scales. The usual fish for garum—tuna, sardines, anchovies, or mackerel—all have scales and are kosher. But it seems even in the first century, a rabbinical certification brought a better price.

As the market for garum grew, low-priced brands began to appear on the market. Slaves even made garum from household fish scraps. There is often a thin line between pungent and rotten, and some of these sauces must have emitted sickening smells. Apicius offered a recipe for fixing garum that smelled bad.

If garum has contracted a bad odor, place a vessel upside down and fumigate it with laurel and cypress and before ventilating it, pour the garum in the vessel. If this does not help matters, and if the taste is too pronounced, add honey and fresh spikenard [new shoots—
novem spicum
] to it; that will improve it. Also new must should be likewise effective.

W
HEN THE ROMANS
took over the Phoenician salt fish trade, they discovered how to make their purple dye. A logical byproduct of fish salting, the dye was produced by salting murex, a Mediterranean mollusk whose three-inch shell resembles a dainty whelk.

According to legend, the presence of this dye was discovered when Hercules took his sheepdog for a walk along the beach in Tyre. When the inquisitive dog bit into a shellfish, his mouth turned a strange dark color. From at least as early as 1500
B.C.
, this dye brought wealth to merchants in Tyre.

The painstakingly extracted purple dye was a luxury item of such prestige that the color purple became a way of showing wealth and power. Julius Caesar decreed that only he and his household could wear purple-trimmed togas. The high priests of Judaism, the Cohanim, dyed the fringes of their prayer shawls purple. Cleopatra dyed the sails of her warship purple. Virgil, the first-century-
B.C.
poet, wrote, “And let him drink from a jeweled cup and sleep on Sarran purple,” Sarran meaning “from Tyre.”

murex

Pliny wrote that men were slaves to “luxury, which is a very great and influential power inasmuch as men scour forests for ivory and citrus-wood and all the rocks of Gaetulia (North Africa) for the murex and for purple.”

Romans who could afford it also ate murex, the ultimate luxury food, which they called “purple fish.” One recipe called for it to be served surrounded by the tiny birds known as figpeckers. It is still eaten, steamed and twisted out of the shell with a pin, by the French, who call it
rocher,
the Spanish, who call it
cañadilla,
and the Portuguese, who call it
búzio.

Pliny described the arduous process to obtain the dye:

There is a white vein with a very small amount of liquid in it: . . . Men try to catch the murex alive because it discharges its juice when it dies. They obtain the juice from the larger purple-fish by removing the shell: they crush the smaller ones together with their shell, which is the only way to make them yield their juice. . . .

The vein already mentioned is removed, and to this, salt has to be added in the proportion of about one pint for every 100 pounds. It should be left to dissolve for three days, since, the fresher the salt, the stronger it is. The mixture is then heated in a lead pot with about seven gallons of water to every fifty pounds and kept at a moderate temperature by a pipe connected to a furnace some distance away. This skims off the flesh which will have adhered to the veins, and after about nine days the cauldron is filtered and a washed fleece is dipped by way of a trial. Then the dyers heat the liquid until they feel confident of the result.—
Gaius Plinius Secundus, Pliny the Elder,
Historia naturalis,
first century
A.D.

The nature of the precious liquid from which purple came would not be entirely understood for another two millennia. In 1826, a twenty-three-year-old student at the Ecole de Pharmacie, Antoine Jérôme Balard, after studying the composition of salt marshes, concluded that the blackish-purplish, foul-smelling liquid present in marsh water, the residue water from which salt crystals had formed, was a previously unidentified chemical element. Because the liquid was identical to the purple secretion of the murex, he named the new element
muride
. The
Académie Française
, wary of having major discoveries come from students, thought at the least it should not let him give the name. So they changed
muride
to
bromine
, a word meaning “stench.”

Murex was made in much of the Roman Mediterranean, in North Africa, on the Mediterranean coast of Gaul. Mountains of ancient murex shells from Roman times have been found in the Israeli port of Accra. Between this stinking bromine solution from the dyeworks and the smell of fish being cured, the Roman Empire must have had a redolent coast.