I resolved to procure him this satisfaction, and invited him to dine with me on the next day.
He came. I kept company with him to the tenth dozen, after which I let him go on alone. He managed to eat thirty-two dozen within an hour for the person who opened them was not very skilful.
In the interim, I was idle, and as that is always a painful state at the table, I stopped him at the moment when he was in full swing. "Mon cher," said I, "you will not to-day eat as many oysters as you meant—let us dine." We did so, and he acted as if he had fasted for a week.
Muria-Garum
The ancients extracted from fish two highly flavored seasonings, muria and garum.
The first was the juice of the thuny, or to speak more precisely, the liquid substance which salt causes to flow from the fish.
Garum was dearer, and we know much less of it. It is thought that it was extracted by pressure from the entrailles of the scombra or mackerel; but this supposition does not account for its high price. There is reason to believe it was a foreign sauce, and was nothing else but the Indian soy, which we know to be only fish fermented with mushrooms.
Certainly, people from their locality are forced to live almost entirely upon fish. They also feed their working animals with it, and the latter from custom gradually grow to like this strange food. They also manure the soil with it, yet always receive the same quantity from the sea which surrounds them.
It has been observed that such nations are not so courageous as those that eat flesh. They are pale, a thing not surprising, for the elements of fish must rather repair the lymph than the blood.
Among ichthyophages, remarkable instances of longevity are observed, either because light food preserves them from plethora, or that the juices it contains being formed by nature only to constitute cartilages which never bears long duration, their use retards the solidification of the parts of the body which, after all, is the cause of death.