Oenogarum (Wine-and-Garum Sauce) for Fish

History

The collection known as Apicius survives as a Late-Antique compilation (c. 4th-5th c. CE) that carries the name of the 1st-century gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicius rather than his demonstrable authorship. This dressing for fish — pepper, rue, honey, raisin-wine (passum), liquamen and reduced must (caroenum), warmed over the gentlest fire, with a variant thickened by starch (amulum) once it boils — is an oenogarum, a wine-and-garum dressing: a common preparation, though it was liquamen, not this wine-garum compound, that served as the book's everyday workhorse. It epitomises the Roman house style, fermented-fish salt played against honey and grape-must sweetness. Fermented fish sauce was the umami backbone of Roman cooking, appearing in the great majority of the recipes as an ordinary seasoning rather than a flourish. Cooks distinguished grades: costly garum, drawn from fish blood and viscera, from cheaper liquamen pressed from whole small fish, down to the paste allec and the prized tuna haimation. Tellingly, the word garum appears in Apicius almost only inside the compound oenogarum, while liquamen is the term used throughout. It was industrially made in coastal salting factories (cetariae) around the Straits of Gibraltar and on the Atlantic and Black Sea coasts, the fish layered with salt and left to ferment in the sun for months. At Pompeii the merchant Aulus Umbricius Scaurus grew rich on it, his jars stamped as the 'flos' or finest grade and a mosaic of his amphorae set into his floor to advertise the brand.

Ingredients

• pepper
• rue
• honey
• passum
• liquamen
• caroenum

Instructions

1. Pound pepper and rue.
2. Mix in honey, passum, liquamen and caroenum.
3. Heat over a very gentle fire.