This assertion is none too strong, if the receipts for these sauces be duly pondered. Mention of garum, which gets its name from being made originally from the salted blood and entrails of a fish called garon or garos by the Greeks, is in classical writers very general: we find it even in Æschylus and Sophocles.[497]
The various sauces known in Latin are too numerous to recite.[498] The two best, although the authorities are far from unanimous, seem to have been made out of the gills and entrails of the Mackerel and Tunny. The components of one recipe justify Robinson. In addition to other odds and ends, its outstanding feature was the gore and entrails of the Tunny, crammed in a vessel hermetically closed, and only drawn off when decomposition was complete! No wonder Plato the Comedian complains ... “drenching them in putrid garum they will suffocate me.”
Alec, like garum, once the name of a fish (possibly the anchovy), came to signify only the sauce made from it, and subsequently from other cheap fish. It differed from garum chiefly from being thicker, and judging from the recipes probably nastier. You took first the dregs and fæculence remaining after the garum liquor had been decanted: to them, add turbid brine, sodden bodies of the fish, etc., and then you have the semi-solid compound, from which alec was derived, not inaptly yclept “Putrilago.”[499]
If, as Badham (p. 69) asserts but not convincingly, garum a double duty served, as a sauce and as a liqueur, the price of the latter was exorbitant, over £3 a gallon.[500] Martial (Ep., XIII. 102) in
“Expirantis adhuc scombri de sanguine primo Accipe fastosum, munera cara, garum,”
calls attention to the expensive nature of his present, for garum made from the scomber was in Pliny’s words “laudatissimum,” while the ἄλμη, or muria, fabricated from the intestines and nothing else of the tunny was cheap and inferior.
Apart from their gastronomic popularity, the medical efficacy of the various gara as pæaned by Pliny must, like the Waverley Pen, have “come as a boon and a blessing to men,” in the wide range of their cures.[501] For ulcers of the mouth and ears, one mirifice prodest. On the application of other gara, “dumb-foundered flee away” burns, blains, dysenteries, bites of dogs, maximeque crocodili, etc. Chapter 44 might indeed easily pass as the leaflet of an advance agent for a patent pill.
With the knowledge and use of the various internal parts of fish, it is strange to find Caviare, made out of the roe of the Sturgeon, first in a recipe of the ninth century. Soft and hard roes then, as now, were generally exported, but as a separate article it became known only in Byzantine times.[502]
With the hungry desire for fish among all classes and with the deep pockets of the rich enabling them to go to any extreme price, is it any wonder that the trade of a fishmonger at Athens and Rome was most lucrative? Several fishmongers acquired large fortunes and high position. The Athenians even raised to the rank of citizens the sons of Chærephilus, for the adequate reason that he sold such excellent pickled fish![503]
At Athens, and probably at Rome, there existed a Society or Corporation of Fishmongers, akin to our own Fishmongers’ Company, one of the many trade guilds of mediæval times. Its power and political pull often defeated or evaded the stringent regulations, which from time to time fixed the price of fish. In early times fish were sold by the fishermen themselves, as soon as the Fish-Market at Rome had been opened by the ringing of its bell.