Written by Maria Pistocchi — Sunday, October 14th, 2012

The Roman Garum

An unbelievable dressing made by the ancient Romans that we would never eat.

The acronym SPQR is well known all around the world, but what does it mean, exactly? The original meaning in Latin is Senatus PopolusQue Romanus, while in English SPQR is translated as The Senate and People of Rome.

In the famous Asterix cartoon, the acronym SPQR has been distorted in a funny way: from the original version explained above, it has become Sono Pazzi Questi Romani that literally means These Romans are crazy.

That’s exactly what I though when, for the first time, I read the recipe of the Garum: how can they eat such a terrible thing? Who might have invented that? And at last what the heck is the Garum?

The Garum - an evil potion (for us)

The Garum was a sauce used in thousand of ways. It was a spicy sauce, with a strong scent, that the Romans added to everything: soups, vegetables, main dishes and desserts. The Roman poet Marco Valerio Marziale gives us a Garum recipe like the following one:

You have to use oily fish like mackerel and sardines, to which are added, in portion of 1/3, various entrails of fish. You have to prepare a tank well sprinkled with pitch. The tank has to have the capacity of thirty liters. On the bottom of the tank you have to make another layer of dried and tangy herbs as dill, coriander, fennel, celery, mint, pepper, saffron, oregano. On this bottom you have to lay the guts and the whole small fish, while the larger fishes are cut into pieces. Above you have to put a layer of salt that has to be two fingers high. You have to repeat the layers until the rim of the tank. You have to let the fishes stand in salt for seven days. For other days, you have to stir often. Eventually you get a rather thick liquid which is precisely the Garum. It will keep for long.

Strange, isn’t it?

Evolution of the flavours

The Garum might sound horrible — and it really does — but that fact leads us to a profound consideration: everything evolves and it’s all about changes. The mutation we see doesn’t apply only to flavours and aromas, but also to language and everything that concerns human living as well.

Finally we should not surprise ourselves if nowadays those flavours seem intolerable; just one hundred years ago our good dishes would have seemed insane, exactly as we do with the Garum, today.

Sources

www.bibliolab.it/I Romani a tavola/garum.htm