Ancient Greek Writings About Fish

From Mastering the Art of Classical Greek Cooking. By Andrew and Rachel Dalby February 01, 2018

Fresh meat—meaning specifically the fresh meat of domestic animals—would be on the classical menu only after a sacrifice: this was a firm rule. Wild game was different—it didn’t have to be offered to a god—but there was not much game to be had around classical Athens. The only likely catch was hare, a love-gift that demonstrated the lover’s hunting skill or generosity. Which of the two? That would depend on whether it was caught—in accordance with the advice of Xenophon’s little manual of hunting, which assumes that hare will be the usual catch—or bought. Hare was no commoner in the classical diet than other fresh meats, but we are lucky enough to have one classical recipe for it, or rather, a choice of recipes from which we are very firmly guided toward one. Archestratos, Greece’s first gastronomic poet, writing about 350 BC, pronounces on the subject in his inimitable way:

There are many ways, many rules for the preparation of hare. This is the best, to bring the roast meat in and serve to each while they are drinking hot, simply sprinkled with salt, taking it from the spit while still a little rare. Don’t worry if you see the ichor seeping from the meat, but eat greedily. To me the other recipes are altogether out of place, gluey sauces over it, cheese over it, too much oil over it, as if you were cooking a weasel.

Homer and Hesiod never mention seafood at all, but to judge by the written texts fish was far commoner than fresh meat at dinner in classical Athens. Fragments from an astonishing range of Athenian comedies show aspects of the fish business, from market to kitchen to table. Athenians were not fishermen. If they wanted fish, they paid for it, and the price of fish—always higher than it ought to be—was a surprisingly common topic of conversation. There was even a book about it: “Lynkeus of Samos wrote Shopping for Fish for one of his friends who disliked shopping: it told him how much he should offer to the murderous fishmongers to get what he wanted reasonably and painlessly.” From this bible of the fourth-century gastronome one extract survives:

To quell their steely gaze and unwavering prices it is not ineffective to stand over the fish and criticize it, recalling Archestratos or another such poet, and quoting the line: The inshore mormyros, a poor fish, never worthy; and if it’s spring: Bonito? Buy in autumn…; and if it’s summer: Gray mullet’s wonderful when winter comes! There are many possibilities. You will frighten off most of the shoppers and bystanders, and so the man will have to settle at the price you choose.

These little embedded verses are not real quotations but a literary game at which Lynkeus’ friend is assumed to be able to beat the fishmonger. It was Hesiod who wrote “never worthy,” not about a bream but about Askra, his hometown. Archestratos did advise cooking bonito in autumn, but not in those words.

Once the fish was bought, it had to be cooked, and comedy cooks are full of information on how to treat each species in the astonishingly wide range to be found in the Athenian market. One speaker in a comedy by Sotades, equally proud of his market and kitchen skills, lists a whole marine banquet: shrimp cooked in the frying pan; a galeos dogfish—“I’ve baked the middle pieces, I’m boiling the rest of it with a mulberry sauce to go with it”; two bluefish steaks—“into a casserole with them, with a few herbs, cumin, salt, water, and a drop of olive oil”; “a very fine sea bass: to be cooked in stock with oil and herbs, after taking off the steaks to be grilled on spits”; red mullets and wrasses on the grill, dressed with oil and oregano; a boiled stuffed squid; cuttlefish tentacles simply roasted, with “a side salad of all sorts of greens”; small fry dressed with oil; a conger cooked in “stock with strong herb flavors”; gobies and rockfish, dredged in flour and fried; a bonito “dipped in oil, wrapped in fig leaves, sprinkled with oregano, and hidden like a firebrand under heaped ashes”; “some little Phaleron anchovies: a cup of water over these is enough; I’ll chop herbs and tip them on with a good jug of oil…That’s the art, and you don’t learn it from books and notes.” Sometimes the recipes are given as instructions from a cook to a slave. This sharp dialogue is by Antiphanes:

“No, no, the stone bass to simmer in brine, as I told you before.”
“And the sea bass?”
“Bake whole.”
“The galeos?”
“Boil with fresh chopped herbs.”
“The eel?”
“Salt, oregano, water.”
“The conger?”
“Same.”
“The ray?”
“Greens.”
“There’s a slice of tuna.”
“Bake it.”
“The kid?”
Roast it.”
“The other?”
“The opposite.”
“The spleen?”
“Stuffed.”

What’s surprising is that however jokily the topic is inserted into comedy dialogue—“Do you know how to cook horse mackerel?” “I will when you’ve told me”—the recipes are real. We know this not just because they make good sense, but also because they agree with other recipes on the few occasions when other recipes survive.

Notice the simplicity. No cumin, no coriander, not even onions and garlic, though these were welcome in their proper place. Fish wanted nothing but olive oil, good fresh herbs, and occasionally good wild greens. No spices—certainly not pepper, which was still vanishingly rare in Europe. Even the two exotic spices known to have been in use in classical Athens do not show up in fish cookery: fruity sumac, familiar to Mycenaeans, and the legendary silphion of ancient Libya.

Silphion was the resin of a sturdy fennel-like plant that was never found naturalized beyond north Africa. It was imported to Greece, sold at a high price, and prized by classical cooks and dieticians, who thought it good for the stomach. It was grated, along with cheese, vinegar, and oil, onto birds for roasting, and similarly served with cheese and vinegar to flavor fish. It was an ingredient in marinades and sauces. Its role in luxury Greek cuisine can be compared with that of garlic in French cookery. The Romans learned about silphion from the Greeks and liked to eat the whole root and stem, sliced and preserved in vinegar. They overexploited it: “The single stem found within living memory was sent to the emperor Nero,” Pliny reports sadly. Alexander’s troops had meanwhile discovered a silphion substitute in Central Asia, the resin known to us as asafetida, but this was never adopted into Greek cuisine.

One other important flavor was new to classical Greece. This was garos, fish sauce, a Greek or Phoenician invention, first made at Greek colonies in the Crimea and at Greek and Carthaginian colonies on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, where archaeologists have found large-scale facilities. From the producers’ point of view it was an excellent way to use the offcuts and innards of fish that were destined for export, dried, smoked, or salted. From the ancient cook’s point of view garos was a fermented sauce, one of those familiar in many parts of the world that add savor and saltiness. Soy sauce is the best known, but those who want to get closest to the ancient garos use Southeast Asian fish sauce, made in exactly the same way. The fashion for garos was transmitted to the Romans and preserved (so to speak) in the Byzantine Empire, and the known historic recipes, intended for small-scale production at a farm near the sea, are Byzantine.

Well known by the fifth century BC (the tragedian Aeschylus, curiously, is the earliest known writer to mention it), garos remained an everyday item until the sixteenth century.

From Archestratus:

“But I say to hell with saperde, a Pontic dish, And those who praise it. For few people Know which food is wretched and which is excellent. But get a mackerel on the third day, before it goes into saltwater Within a transport jar as a piece of recently cured, half-salted fish.
And if you come to the holy city of famous Byzantion, I urge you again to eat a steak of peak-season tuna; for it is very good and soft.”  

“Do not allow anyone come near you when you bake sea wolf neither Syracusan nor Italiote, for they do not know how to prepare them decently. But they ruin them and make a mess out of them with cheeses and sprinklings of the liquid vinegar and the silphion brine.

“First I shall recall the gifts to humankind and fair-haired Demeter, friend Moschus: take them to your heart. The best one can get, the finest of all, cleanly hulled from good ripe ears, is the barley from the sea-washed breast of famous Eresus in Lesbos – whiter than airborne snow. If the gods eat barley, this is where Hermes goes shopping for it.

“But if you go to the prosperous land of Ambracia and happen to see the boarfish, buy it! Even if it costs its weight in gold, don’t leave without it, lest the dread vengeance of the deathless ones breathes down on you; for this fish is the flower of nectar…”