FISH-SAUCES—MACKEREL’S BEARD 213 
The various sauces known in Latin are too numerous to 
recite.! The two best, although the authorities are far from 
unanimous, seem to have been made out of the gills and 
entrails of the Mackerel and Tunny. The components of one 
recipe justify Robinson. In addition to other odds and ends, 
its outstanding feature was the gore and entrails of the Tunny, 
crammed in a vessel hermetically closed, and only drawn off 
when decomposition was complete! No wonder Plato the 
Comedian complains . . . “ drenching them in putrid garum 
they will suffocate me.”’ 
Alec, like garum, once ihe name of a fish (possibly the 
anchovy), came to signify only the sauce made from it, and 
subsequently from other cheap fish. It differed from garum 
chiefly from being thicker, and judging from the recipes 
probably nastier. You took first the dregs and feculence 
remaining after the garum liquor had been decanted: to 
them, add turbid brine, sodden bodies of the fish, etc., and 
then you have the semi-solid compound, from which alec was 
derived, not inaptly yclept “ Putrilago.” 2 
If, as Badham (p. 69) asserts but not convincingly, garum 
a double duty served, as a sauce and as a liqueur, the price of 
the latter was exorbitant, over {3a gallon.3 Martial (Ep., XIII. 
102) in 
“ Expirantis adhuc scombri de sanguine primo 
Accipe fastosum, munera cava, garum,”’ 
calls attention to the expensive nature of his present, for 
1 Pauly-Winowa, Real-Enc., VII. 841-9, has nine columns on the subject, 
ending with a bibliography ! 
? Horace, Sat., II. 4,73; Martial, III. 77,5; and V. 11., 94. The greatest 
delicacy of all these mixtures, the so-called Gavum Sociovum, exported all 
over the Empire from Carteia, New Carthage, etc., was compounded of the 
intestines of the Spanish Mackerel. The absence of beard in the Mackerel is 
accounted for by this fish being convicted of treason against the reigning 
Monarch, and condemned to perpetual loss of beard. Keller, op. cit., 326, 
omits a reference to this Fischeprozess, but cites the habit of writers—especially 
Bucolic—explaining any natural curiosity by putting into poetic or other 
shape a legend or Volkslied dealing with the point, e.g. sop’s fable why the 
Camel lacks horns. 
3 Pliny, XXXI. 43: “‘singulis milibus nummum permutantibus congios 
fere binos.”’ Jbid., 44: ‘‘transiit deinde in luxuriam creveruntque genera ad 
infinitum, sicuti garum ad colorem mulsi veteris, adeoque suavitatem dilutum, 
ut bibi possit.”” Cf. Martial, Ep., XIII. 82.2: ‘Nobile nunc sitio Juxuriosa 
garum, and Celius Aurelianus”” (De Chyonicis, II.; De Paralysi), on the liquor 
extracted from the Scomber. 
