Oenogarum

What oenogarum is

Oenogarum is garum seasoned with wine. The name joins the Greek word for wine to garum, and the Byzantine Greek form is enogaros. It belongs to a small family of sauces in which fish sauce is the base and a second liquid or seasoning is added, each named for what was added. Oenogarum is the best attested of them and the only one with an ingredient list in the sources.

The Roman recipe is not a fermentation of its own. The garum or liquamen is made first, by salting fish and leaving them in the sun, and oenogarum is the seasoning made from it.

In the Apicius cookbook

In the Apicius cookbook, oenogarum is a mixture of wine, liquamen, pepper and occasionally other spices and herbs, with olive oil commonly added. The Encyclopaedia Romana entry reads it as something like a table vinaigrette, mixed at the table and not at the stage of fermenting the fish. That reading is the entry's inference from the wording of the recipes, not a statement in the text. The entry gives no recipe numbers for oenogarum, so the wording has not been checked against the Latin here.

Sally Grainger notes that Apicius uses liquamen for the common fish sauce, and that garum appears mainly in compounds such as oenogarum, which she describes as a dressing of wine or vinegar, oil and fish sauce. From this she argues that plain black garum was a more specialised product, served at the table as a finishing sauce instead of cooked with. She presents that as a theory about usage, not a proven fact.

A cooked version

A passage attributed to Gargilius Martialis gives a cooked oenogarum. Oily fish such as salmon, herring, shad and sardines are sealed in a jar with a great deal of dried herb and salt for seven days. Wine, more herbs and honey are then added to the liquamen, and the mixture is reduced over a fire and strained until clear.

The entry that reports the passage notes that the section may be a later medieval addition. It mentions spices such as cloves and cinnamon, which Greek and Roman recipes did not use, and that is taken as a sign of a later date. The passage should not be assigned to the ancient period without that caveat.

Other mixtures made from garum

The same pattern gives hydrogarum (garum with water), oxygarum (with vinegar) and mellogarum (with honey). The Encyclopaedia Romana entry lists them in one general statement and attributes them to Apicius, but it quotes no passage that says how they were made. Grainger cites one Apicius recipe that sets garum beside vinegar, the oxyporium of recipe 1.32.

The Cyprus Food Museum gives the Byzantine Greek forms for garos diluted with water, wine, vinegar or oil: hydrogaros, enogaros, oxygaros and garéleon. The oil mixture is listed last, and garéleon is read as the oil mixture; the entry does not state that pairing in so many words. These are Byzantine records of the 11th and 12th centuries, and they should be kept apart from the Roman cookbook evidence, even though the names look alike.

Galen mentions garos added to wine, oil or vinegar to move the bowels and to treat diarrhoea. In another passage a student who lived on vegetables seasoned lupins and beans with garos, sometimes adding oil, wine and vinegar. These show mixtures in use at the table and as a remedy, outside the recipe books.

What the sources do not give

No source gives a quantity, a ratio or a time for oenogarum, oxygarum, hydrogarum or garéleon, and none quotes a complete recipe for the last three. The mixtures show that garum served as a base seasoning that a cook could adjust with wine, vinegar, water or oil. They do not show a separate fermentation for each, and a garum with wine is not the same food as a garum with vinegar.

The next check is the Apicius text itself, for the exact wording of the recipes and any quantity in the Latin, and the Byzantine Greek texts for the Cyprus terms.