The spirit of cookery

The reader may find some further discussion of this question in Soyer’s ‘ Pantropheon.’ He may also there read the recipes for the composition of two stomachics into which garum entered, namely, hypotrimma and moretaria. Interesting, however, is the note from Bose, that while at the present day garum is forgotten in Italy, in Turkey it is still in use. ‘ The innkeepers of Constantinople preserve in garum the cooked fish not consumed in the day.’ Brillat-Savarin has a chapter on garum and muria, and comes to the entirely unfounded surmise that the Eoman garum had been the same as soy, which comes from India, resp. China, resp. Japan, and which soy, he says, was the result of the fermentation of fish with mushrooms. But soy is made from a bean, soya, and neither fish nor mushrooms ever come near it. (Spurious soy contains besides the bean extract, a quantity of molasses.) Muria may be translated as brine simply, for it signified the mother liquor of common salt, or nitre, etc. (by Linne it was applied to solid salt made from salt springs uot connected with the sea), but it was also a synonym of garum. Savarin had evidently never tasted soy, as gustation alone, if he had that diagnostic power, would have taught him that it contained no principle of either fish or fungus. According to Dioscorides (c/. Matthiolus, ‘ Comment.,’ 154), garum was also used as an antiseptic to wounds, and in a variety of surgical applications. The turbot is one of the most elegant fishes, and has been so highly appreciated at all historical times that it has become the object of anecdote. Juvenal relates that the Emperor Diocletian, having received a present of a very large turbot, consulted the Senate regarding the vessel in which the fish was to be cooked, and the sauce which was to be served with it. The senators, however, perhaps perceiving that they were being played with, separated without coming to a resolution. The statement by Berchoux, the culinary bard, in his inagiric epic ‘ G astronomic’ attached to Brillat-Savarin’s book, that this turbot ‘ had been put to the sauce piquante,’ is probably a product of his imagination. Brillat-Savarin himself relates a story of which he was the magiric hero, and a turbot the corpus vile of experiment. He steamed a turbot in an old hitherto unused wash-copper (boiler) on a tray cut out of the cover of a wicker winebasket, loaded with herbs, roots, rhizomes, etc. The fish pleased the convivants : the General Labassee smiled at every morsel ; the cure had his neck extended, and his eyes fixed on the ceiling as a sign of his ecstatic delight; i'k>E/‘ARATJO.\'S OF TURBOT the academician M. Auger had brilliant eyes and a radiant face, like an author who is applauded ; and another academician, M. Villemain, had his head inclined, and his chin turned to the west, like one who listens with attention. M. Lorrain, ‘ degustateur fortement papille,’ also took his part well, and host and hostess, the latter Savarin’s cousin, who had differed on the treatment of the fish before the great solution, became reconciled ; the trencher rested, aud Savarin was happy.