Cooking and Processing Fish in Antiquity: Questions of Taste and Texture

Journal of Maritime Archaeology (2018) 13:225–234 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11457-018-9194-2 ORIGINAL PAPER Cooking and Processing Fish in Antiquity: Questions of Taste and Texture John Wilkins1 Published online: 15 November 2018 © The Author(s) 2018 Abstract Scholars have sometimes given the impression that the consumption of fish in the ancient world was most importantly an obsession of the wealthy and corrupt. The politics of fisheating however is only one small part of the interaction of the Greeks and Romans with fish. The written record shows the widest engagement with fish, their variety and names, along with the cooking, preparation and processing of them. My paper shows that fish are embedded in the cooking codes of the Greeks relating to sacrifice and medicine, and that while fish are wild animals living in an element hostile to human beings, they may also be assimilated into a healthy human body because of their similarity to us. At all times taste is a crucial factor, producing both the perfectly cooked meal and the best state of health in the body—the balancing of the humours. Keywords Greek · Food · Fish · Biology · Nutrition Much discussion of the preservation and cooking of fish in the ancient world draws on approaches and methods developed in the modern world. This chapter considers the topic from an ancient perspective, as far as we can discern what that is, based on ancient texts. Some argue that the comedies of ancient Athens reveal little about fish consumption (Gallant 1984), others that eating fish was a luxurious activity reserved for the wealthy (Davidson 1997). I shall challenge these propositions: they contain an element of the truth, but do not do justice to the ancient evidence. All, I think, will agree that the sea was ambiguous in ancient thought: bountiful, but also threatening to life; rich in opportunity but unpredictable and dangerous; part of the wildness of nature along with mountains and uncultivated land beyond fields and cities. Here I review what the Greeks and Romans wrote and thought about eating fish, drawing on the Greeks’ extraordinary commitment to three areas of activity: cooking in a broad sense; writing texts; and commenting on fish. This material may be placed beside archaeological and scientific considerations about ancient fish processing to form a composite picture of * John Wilkins 1 University of Exeter, Exeter, UK 13 Vol.:(0123456789) 226 Journal of Maritime Archaeology (2018) 13:225–234 how fish was prepared and eaten in antiquity. I will concentrate on material from the fifth century BC to about 200 AD, by which time Greek and Roman thought had interacted for centuries. Cooking and Cooking Codes Fishing exists on the margins of culture, which depends on working with or modifying nature to provide food and a sustainable environment: culture, though threatened by nature, can live with it through practices of farming and religion with aid from the gods who control nature and may alleviate famine, disease and death. A key element of culture is fire, identified by the Greeks in the myth of Prometheus, who brought smelting, technology and cooking (pepsis) to ease human vulnerability to nature. Cooking was imagined in two respects in particular, the cooking of an animal in sacrifice and the cooking or digestion of food in the body of humans and other animals. In sacrifice (‘religious’ cooking), a domesticated animal was sacrificed in the presence of the worshippers, its blood collected and thrown over the altar; it was flayed, butchered, cooked, distributed in equal portions, and eaten. The cooking skills were deployed to express the power of the immortal gods, who got the bone marrow, and the mortality of the human worshippers who eat the meat and entrails.1 This is how Greeks and Romans expressed their Greek or Roman identity. The men and women of Athens or Corinth might sacrifice a bull to the city’s god and thereby assert their allegiance and belonging to that community. Fish do not really belong to this eating code—though there are exceptions in the literary and epigraphic record2—and are bought in the market and eaten at private rather than civic gatherings. Because they were not normally linked with civic religion, they had a lesser status in the ancient city. Their value lay essentially in their protein contribution to the diet—supplementing grains and pulses—and in expressing status: rich people enjoyed rarer fish within their luxury diet. Fish are marginal at best in the sacrificial code. In medicine, however (‘biological’ cooking), the picture is very different. Here, related cooking skills were used to convert wild food into digestible food as Galen sets out in On the Properties of Foodstuffs. He considers staple grains first, then meat and fish. In this code a pig has the same role to play as a sea-bass. Digestion is seen as the ‘cooking’ of food, which the heat of the body transforms into blood. In the early Hippocratic text On Ancient Medicine cooking is seen as the origin of medicine; this cooking lies behind the incorporation of tastes into the theory of the humours. Cooking is at the heart of medicine and brings the wild into manageable culture. (As we shall see, both biology and cookery books, first seen in the fourth century BC, derive from these medical texts.) The author explains: For human beings endured much terrible suffering because of their strong and brutish regimen, consuming foods that were raw, unblended, and possessing great powers … falling into severe pains and diseases followed by a speedy death. … These people sought for nourishment suited to their constitution and discovered that which we eat today. (3, trans. Schiefsky) 1 2 Detienne and Vernant (1979). Purcell (1995). 13 Journal of Maritime Archaeology (2018) 13:225–234 227 From wheat, by moistening, winnowing, grinding, sifting, kneading and baking it they made bread, and from barley they made barley cake. And performing many other operations to prepare this nourishment, they boiled and baked and mixed and blended the strong and unblended things with the weaker, molding everything to the constitution and power of the human being. (3, trans. Schiefsky) This is how to maintain health and alleviate disease: the cooking of food has made possible sustainable digestion and health in human beings. A little later, the human being is revealed to be composed of vital juices—the later humours—which have particular flavours: For there is in the human being salty and bitter and sweet and acid and astringent and insipid and myriad other things having powers of all kinds in quantity and strength. These when mixed and blended with one another are neither manifest not cause the human being pain; but when one of them separates off and comes to be on its own, then it is both manifest and causes pain (14.4, trans. Schiefsky) Each food that the human being consumes also has taste qualities, which must be matched up with the individ (...truncated)