
Garum: Recipes From the Past
Tom Verde
Ursula Janssen
2020, Independently Published, 979-8-63491-120-5, $32 pb.
Historical recipes, as author Ursala Janssen points out, can be difficult to interpret because they are often little more than “a list of (proposed) ingredients.” Informative and wide-ranging— borrowing from Mesopotamia to Elizabethan Europe—her book aims to offer recipes “you can actually easily do at home, in a normal household kitchen, with readily available ingredients.” Janssen does suggest substitutes for ingredients like vinegar for verjuice (the juice of unripened grapes, popular in medieval/Renaissance cuisine) or Thai fish sauce for the garum of the title, a heady concoction of fermented fish guts, a favored condiment in the Greco-Roman world. But where is one to find “2 pigeons, preferably with heart, liver, and gizzards” at the average grocery store when preparing the questionably appetizing Babylonian pigeon burger? Honey-sweetened, Roman-era cheesecake in a terracotta bowl sounds tempting. But its two cups of “white cheese” (feta? cottage?) is somewhat vague. A better volume for the armchair gourmet or food-history enthusiast than the home cook.
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