Salt (11 page)

How green olives are conserved.

Before they turn black, they are to be broken and put into water. The water is to be changed frequently. When they have soaked sufficiently they are drained, put in vinegar, and oil is added. 1.2 pound salt to 1 peck olives. Fennel and lentisk [the seeds of the lentisk tree] are put up separately in vinegar. When you decide to mix them in, use quickly. Pack in preserving-jars. When you wish to use, take with dry hands.

F
ISH WAS THE
centerpiece of Roman cuisine. When salted, it was also at the heart of Roman commerce. The Greek physician Galen, who lived from
A.D.
130 to 200, wrote about the Roman salt fish trade. Galen was the first to understand the significance of reading pulses, and his writings on health and diet were a major influence on medicine well into the Middle Ages. It was not a coincidence that a physician would be writing about salt fish since, like salt, it was considered both a food and a medicine.

Galen described Rome’s ports busy with ships unloading salt fish from the eastern and western Mediterranean. He said that the best salt fish he knew was called
sarda
, but he also praised the tuna salted in Sardinia or in Gades, Spain, and salted mullet from the Black Sea. Sarda may refer to the small tuna now called bonito or Atlantic mackerel, or the sardine, a small young pilchard, which is a uniquely European fish. He also praised salt fish from Egypt and cured Spanish mackerel from the port of Sexi in southern Spain.

By Galen’s time, the centuries-old trade in both salted fish and fermented salt fish sauce had been well established in the Mediterranean. It had even been a topic of physicians before. But what struck Galen in the second century was that never before in history had the trade been so extensive and on such a massive scale.

I
N 241 B.C.,
at the end of the Punic Wars, when Phoenician Carthage was crushed, Sicily, the largest island in the Mediterranean, came under Roman control. Sicily was known as the “breadbasket of Rome” for its grain. But it also had valuable fisheries. Catching, salt curing, and selling fish was the major activity of the entire Sicilian coastline, and the most famous fish throughout the Mediterranean was the salted bluefin tuna.

The Sicilians made salt by boiling the seawater caught in the island’s many marshes. Excavations have revealed ancient salt-works concentrated in the western part of the island around Trapani and on the island of Favignana. Not coincidentally, these are the areas from which the bluefin tuna is fished.

Archestratus, the Sicilian-born fourth-century-
B.C.
Greek poet and gourmet, praised his native island’s tuna, both fresh and salted, stored in jars. Normally when a tuna was caught, the choice upper body parts were eaten fresh, and the drier tail meat was reserved for salting. But Archestratus offered an interesting compromise.

Take the tail of the female tuna—and I’m talking of the large female tuna whose mother city is Byzantium. Then slice it and bake all of it properly, simply sprinkling it lightly with salt and brushing with oil. Eat the slices hot, dipping them into a sharp brine. They are good if you want to eat them dry, like the immortal gods in form and stature. If you serve it sprinkled with vinegar, it will be ruined.—
Archestratus,
The Life of Luxury,
fourth century b.c.

Archestratus also admired the Black Sea tuna coming from Byzantium, the site of present-day Istanbul. These fish were from the same schools. The bluefin passes Sicily on its spawning journey to the Black Sea. In pre-Roman times, the Black Sea was a major fishing and salt fish area, especially for tuna, but also herring, sturgeon, flounder, mackerel, and anchovies. Herodotus singled out the salted sturgeon of what is now the Dnieper River, which flows through the Ukraine into the Black Sea.

F
ROM THE BLACK
Sea to the Strait of Gibraltar, salt production was usually placed near fishing areas, creating industrial zones that produced a range of salt-based products, including various types of salt fish, fish sauces, and purple dye.

Salsamentum,
from
sal,
salt, was the Roman word for salted products. The most commercially important salsamentum was salt fish. Whereas the Greeks had developed an entire vocabulary for salt fish, describing the type of cure, the place of origin, the cut of fish, salted with scales, or without scales, the Romans simply spoke of salsamentum, from which they made a good deal of money.

After the producers made all of these salsamenta, the scraps—the innards, the gills, and the tails—were used to make sauce. Roman writings mention four classes of sauce:
garum, liquamen, allec,
and
muria.
The exact meaning of these terms has been lost. Allec may have been the leftover sludge after the sauce was strained. Garum and liquamen ended up being generic terms for fermented fish sauce.

To make the sauce, the fish scraps were put in earthen jars with alternating layers of salt and weighted on the top to keep them submerged in the pickle that developed as salt drew moisture out of the fish. Classics scholars have searched for precise ancient garum recipes, but the clearest are medieval, from
Geoponica,
a Greek agricultural manual written about
A.D.
900. It offered a number of garum recipes based on earlier sources:

The so-called liquamen is made in this manner: the intestines of fish are thrown into a vessel and salted. Small fish, either the best smelt, or small mullet, or sprats, or wolffish, or whatever is deemed to be small, are all salted together and, shaken frequently, are fermented in the sun.

After it has been reduced in the heat, garum is obtained from it in this way: a large, strong basket is placed into the vessel of the aforementioned fish, and the garum streams into the basket. In this way the so-called liquamen is strained through the basket when it is taken up. The remaining refuse is allec. . . .

Next, if you wish to use the garum immediately, that is to say not ferment it in the sun, but to boil it, you do it this way. When the brine has been tested, so that an egg having been thrown in floats (if it sinks, it is not sufficiently salty), and throwing the fish into the brine in a newly-made earthenware pot and adding in some oregano, you place it on a sufficient fire until it is boiled, that is until it begins to reduce a little. Some throw in boiled-down must [unfermented wine]. Next, throwing the cooled liquid into a filter, you toss it a second and a third time through the filter until it turns out clear. After having covered it, store it away.

Physicians saw in garum all of the health benefits of salt fish contained in a bottle. It was prescribed as a medicine or, more commonly, mixed with other ingredients to make a medicine, usually for digestive disorders, and for such problems as sores, for which salt has clear healing powers. But it was also prescribed for a range of other ailments, including sciatica, tuberculosis, and migraine headaches.

The only other place in the ancient world to use garum was Asia. The sauce appears to be, as some historians believe of the domesticated pig, an idea that occurred independently to the East and the West. The Asian sauce is thought to have originated in Vietnam, though the Vietnamese must have taken it in ancient times from the Chinese soy sauce, in those early times when the Chinese fermented fish with the beans.

In Vietnam salt is so appreciated that poor people sometimes make a meal of nothing more than rice and a salt blend, either salt and chili powder or the more expensive salt with ground, grilled sesame seeds. Salt is also mixed with minced ginger root. But more popular than any of these, since ancient times, is
mám
a brine made from salting small fish. Unlike the Roman version, Asian garum has remained popular into modern times and is made virtually everywhere in Southeast Asia, including Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, and the Philippines, where it is called
bagoong
. In Thailand, where it is called
nam pla,
it is produced by more than 200 factories. The Koreans, the Chinese, the Japanese, even the Indians have variations.

In Vietnam,
is served over fruits and vegetables with hot peppers and garlic for New Year.
Tré
is a boiled pig head cut in slices and seasoned with
.
has many variations:
cáy
uses crab;
squid;
tôm,
shrimp.