Liquamen

I’m always interested in different foods, different flavours, different combinations of flavours; I’m interested in eating and trying,but also reading about them too. When my son was young he was fascinated by the Romans and became very knowledgeable and I bought him a Roman cookery book. He’s also a good cook so he did try a few of the recipes, all successful as far as I remember.

He had a number of books about every aspect of Roman life, some were children’s books and when talking about Roman cooking there was often a lot of silly comments about the Roman’s love of liquamen or garum, a condiment made from fish. Liquamen is a fish sauce, and an essential flavour for many Roman dishes. In my cupboard right now is a bottle, not of liquamen, but an Asian version, nam pla – lovely, spiky fish sauce! we cook a lot of Thai and other Asian foods so use a lot of nam pla, but I stick it into all sorts of other things I am cooking to give a subtle kick and depth of flavour to the dishes.

I wonder how many of the authors who made those silly comments in children’s books about the Romans use Lea and Perrin’s Worcester sauce… I wonder how many of them have looked at the ingredients?!

4 Comments

controversialcook on March 10, 2015 at 10:51 am

I had a friend who once started to cook Roman food and was telling me all about liquamen. To be honest from his description of the stuff it didn’t sound appetising to me.. But then I don’t know? If I taste it I may like it because I love fish. The Romans learnt a lot about cooking from the Etruscans after they conquered them. I wonder if liquamen was originally Etruscan? Anyway it’s an interesting topic that you have posted.

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Lois on March 10, 2015 at 1:25 pm
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Thank you! To be honest, although it smells very strange, when it is added to dishes the pungency disappears and it just seems to highlight other flavours – if you like Thai or Indonesian food I bet you will have eaten an equivalent!
Yes I wonder if it might have been Etruscan…

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