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 For long millennia they live side by side. Man and fish. Each in his own element. Calm, noisy and mysterious, like waves, like the depth of the sea, fish beckon and attract people. An irresistible desire gave rise to many symbols: mermaids playing with ships, goldfish fulfilling wishes, sirens that carry fishermen to death, a little mermaid, a little sea maiden who betrays her element for love.
The desire of people to observe fish in their element is as old as the world, and today it is fulfilled thanks to the opportunity to photograph coral reefs, games of zoologists with whales and dolphins, although they are not really fish. It all started with shells, crabs and crayfish, the very first food that was given by an unfamiliar, alien element of water, and a person did not need to spend a lot of effort, just wet his feet. But soon the greedy human gaze fell on freshwater fish, on pike, trout, which were killed with a club, spear and a drop of luck, on shoals of small fish, which were lured into fences from the rod, and then into traps, in nets.
About five hundred thousand years ago, man first carved the first simple hooks for fishing rods and harpoons, adopted bows and arrows from hunters for hunting fish. With the invention of the paddle, which made the raft and canoe maneuverable, the modest coastal fishing soon emerged. It was only about four thousand years ago that the triple fishhook as we know it appeared, for example, thanks to the trident of Neptune, with which fishermen of the Mediterranean went to hunt tuna.
The fish never became the subject of divine worship, like a bull or a cow, a lion or an ibis, but quite the opposite.
Along the banks of rivers rich in fish, such as the Euphrates, Tigris or Nile, fish already in prehistoric times became the subject of daily trade: in the city of Ur, fried fish was eaten right on the street near stalls and shops, and the ancient Egyptians even established the export of large quantities of salted and dried fish.
In the second century BC, fishing reached Europe, primarily, of course, to the entertainment-hungry Romans, who ordered the digging of ponds and reservoirs near their country houses. Since then, live salt, flounder and moray eels were delivered to the Roman table directly from the banks on the heads of slaves.
But even more important than fresh fish for Roman cuisine was another, not at all fresh fish dish: garum, or liquamen, an odious spicy sauce made from spoiled salted fish, which had lain in the sun for months, without which not a single meal was complete.
This sauce was then used in much the same way as soy sauce today. There were many variations of it. The preparation is described in Apicius's cookbook like this:
"Preparing Garum:
Boil one sextaria of anchovies and three sextaria of good wine until a thick homogeneous mass appears. Sift through a sieve and pour into glass bottles. Garum is a pleasant fish sauce that goes well with almost all dishes. "
For us, this is, so to speak, a method that has not yet been completed. Actually, the "correct" recipe should sound like this:
To prepare garum, you need to let various small salted fish and fish entrails lie in the sun. This process can take quite a long time, sources indicate numerous months. Stir the fish from time to time. Eventually the mass is forced through a sieve and the result is a brown liquid, liquamen or “garum.” Different types of fish are mentioned as ingredients, usually small fish such as anchovies. The fish is used - and this is important - as a whole, without dividing.The resulting liquid, garum, was used immediately as a sauce, or diluted with wine, seasoned with spices, and so on, and Oxygarum (vinegar garum) and Hydrogarum were also known, which was nothing more than a sauce diluted with water.
In the centuries that followed, the development of fishing and fisheries had a double meaning: the development of navigation and, at the same time, sea fishing, and the fasts of the Christian Church, which prohibited meat four weeks before Easter and every Friday.
The monks acted simply: they dug fish ponds in monasteries, and since they were very generous in determining the types of products, frog legs and beaver tails fell on the lean table.
Great dukes and, above all, ordinary people had a harder time, especially in an area far from the sea. Fish belongs to perishable foodstuffs and at that time was kept only in salted or dried state. Therefore, there is nothing surprising in the fact that in the recipes of that time, fish can be found only in the form of salted herring or dried cod.
With the advent of island fishing and the discovery of new lands, and later thanks to modern fishing methods and methods of canning, the time has come, which promoted the slogan "Fish for every table" and proved the inexhaustibility of sea riches.
Today we know that this is not the case, and that the biological balance of our rivers and lakes is very sensitive to any disturbance. The transition from hunting to "grooming and nurturing", which our distant ancestors should have foreseen using the example of animals, will set the tone for the fishing industry of the future, if it ever has one. In the case of freshwater fish, things have gone too far, so that trout and carp, which the Chinese began to breed twelve thousand years ago, today can be seen in a saucepan or in a frying pan more often than ordinary herring, which was fifty years ago, according to the saying , "the food of the poor".
Mironova E.A.
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