For the third course of the menu with adapted recipes in the edition of Het excellente kookboek (The Excellent Cookbook) we decided to put some anchovies on the table as well. There is a still life by the German painter Sebastian Stoskopff (1597-1657) with a dish filled with anchovies as centre piece. It looks like…
salt
Roman fish sauce
Garum or liquamen Garum is one of the basic ingredients in the cuisine of Roman antiquity. It is a fish sauce that was used to salt dishes. One can’t simply use kitchen salt in recipes, because instead of extracting moisture (which is what salt does), garum adds moisture to a dish. When preparing an authentic Roman dish, this sauce is…
Pickle Herring, the ‘forgotten fish’
It is time to change that! In February 2016 I organized a cookery course for the first time in nearly ten years, with members of the re-enactment group Het Woud der Verwachting (litt: ‘the forest of expectation’, after a historical novel by the Dutch author Hella Haasse). The menu was in concordance with the date of the course:…