“Thick sauce for a boiled chicken.—Put the following ingredients into a mortar: aniseed, dried mint, and lazar-root (similar to assafœtida), cover them with vinegar; add dates; pour in liquamen, oil, and a small quantity of mustard seeds; reduce all to a proper thickness with port wine warmed; and then pour this same over your chicken, which should previously be boiled in anise-seed water.”
Liquamen and Garum were synonymous terms for the same thing; the former adopted in the room of the latter, about the age of Aurelian. It was a liquid, and thus prepared: the guts of large fish, and a variety of small fish, were put into a vessel and well salted, and exposed to the sun till they became putrid. A liquor was produced in a short time, which being strained off, was the liquamen.—Vide Lister in Apicium, p. 16, notes.
Essence of anchovy, as it is usually made for sale, when it has been opened about ten days, is not much unlike the Roman liquamen. See [No. 433]. Some suppose it was the same thing as the Russian Caviar, which is prepared from the roe of the sturgeon.
The BLACK BROTH of Lacedæmon will long continue to excite the wonder of the philosopher, and the disgust of the epicure. What the ingredients of this sable composition were, we cannot exactly ascertain. Jul. Pollux says, the Lacedæmonian black broth was blood, thickened in a certain way: Dr. Lister (in Apicium) supposes it to have been hog’s blood; if so, this celebrated Spartan dish bore no very distant resemblance to the black-puddings of our days. It could not be a very alluring mess, since a citizen of Sybaris having tasted it, declared it was no longer a matter of astonishment with him, why the Spartans were so fearless of death, since any one in his senses would much rather die, than exist on such execrable food.—Vide Athenæum, lib. iv. c. 3. When Dionysius the tyrant had tasted the black broth, he exclaimed against it as miserable stuff; the cook replied—“It was no wonder, for the sauce was wanting.” “What sauce?” says Dionysius. The answer was,—“Labour and exercise, hunger and thirst, these are the sauces we Lacedæmonians use,” and they make the coarsest fare agreeable.—Cicero, 3 Tuscul.
[15-*] “The STOMACH is the grand organ of the human system, upon the state of which all the powers and feelings of the individual depend.”—See Hunter’s Culina, p. 13.
“The faculty the stomach has of communicating the impressions made by the various substances that are put into it, is such, that it seems more like a nervous expansion of the brain, than a mere receptacle for food.”—Dr. Waterhouse’s Lecture on Health, p. 4.
[17-*] I wish most heartily that the restorative process was performed by us poor mortals in as easy and simple a manner as it is in “the cooking animals in the moon,” who “lose no time at their meals; but open their left side, and place the whole quantity at once in their stomachs, then shut it, till the same day in the next month, for they never indulge themselves with food more than twelve times in a year.”—See Baron Munchausen’s Travels, p. 188.
Pleasing the palate is the main end in most books of cookery, but it is my aim to blend the toothsome with the wholesome; but, after all, however the hale gourmand may at first differ from me in opinion, the latter is the chief concern; since if he be even so entirely devoted to the pleasure of eating as to think of no other, still the care of his health becomes part of that; if he is sick he cannot relish his food.
“The term gourmand, or EPICURE, has been strangely perverted; it has been conceived synonymous with a glutton, ‘né pour la digestion,’ who will eat as long as he can sit, and drink longer than he can stand, nor leave his cup while he can lift it; or like the great eater of Kent whom Fuller places among his worthies, and tells us that he did eat with ease thirty dozens of pigeons at one meal; at another, fourscore rabbits and eighteen yards of black pudding, London measure!—or a fastidious appetite, only to be excited by fantastic dainties, as the brains of peacocks or parrots, the tongues of thrushes or nightingales, or the teats of a lactiferous sow.
“In the acceptation which I give to the term EPICURE, it means only the person who has good sense and good taste enough to wish to have his food cooked according to scientific principles; that is to say, so prepared that the palate be not offended—that it be rendered easy of solution in the stomach, and ultimately contribute to health; exciting him as an animal to the vigorous enjoyment of those recreations and duties, physical and intellectual, which constitute the happiness and dignity of his nature.” For this illustration I am indebted to my scientific friend Apicius Cælius, Jun., with whose erudite observations several pages of this work are enriched, to which I have affixed the signature A. C., Jun.