If there be doubt as to its classification scientifically, there is none gastronomically. Laberius and Cornelius Nepos ranked it only second to the Acipenser. Ovid (Hal. 131) enters a demurrer against the name given in:
“Et tam deformi non dignus nomine asellus.”
Galen warmly commends the fish for its quality of flesh, and great nutritive power; in these respects, indeed, he places the Mullet, the Lupus, and Sole far below. Xenocrates, whose dictum usually differs from his successor, depreciates it, as does “nobilis ille helluo” Archestratus, whose palate pronounced the flesh “spongy.”
A sovereign remedy for fever and ague are “the small stones found in the head of the Asellus, when the moon is full, and attached in linen to the patient’s body!”[656]
7. The Muræna—M. serpens or helena—(frequently but quite erroneously called the “Lamprey”), with whose taming, teaching, and fighting I have dealt, was on the menu a most welcome and eagerly anticipated item.[657]
Of the Murænidæ, at Athens the Eel, at Rome the Muræna was, as the last chapter shows, the greater favourite. Archestratus, it is true, commands men of taste to buy at all hazards the Muræna of “the Straights”[658]; but the Latin authors sing its praise frequently and fervently.
The comparative want of appreciation of the Eel at Rome may have been merely masculine, and evolved from the Latin boy (prætextatus) regarding “this cousin of the snake” not as a dainty for his palate, but as a scourge for his body! Early association counts for much in later life: so his back’s memory of a flogging with a whip made of eel-skins, twisted tightly together, may have caused the male adult to approach delicately, or not at all, the fish with his freeborn palate.[659]
At the tripatinium, which marked the height of delight at a supper,[660] the Muræna gave the choicest morsel. Horace, Martial, and others not only sing its fame, but give its proper dressing. To Martial’s taste that from Sicily ranked first, but Varro—was it because these, as Suidas asserts, were the largest?—votes for the Spanish fish.
While Apicius (X. 8) hands down various recipes for the proper frying and boiling of the other parts, he distinctly discards, on account of its reputed poisonous properties, the head of the Muræna. But among the Greeks direction follows direction for cooking the Conger’s “exquisite head.” Philemon rhapsodises over—
“noble conger From Sicyon’s bay, the conger which the God Of the deep sea doth bear aloft to Heaven Fit banquet for his brethren.”[661]