On Ill-dressed Fishes

 

When he lived in Venice for a little less than three years, Lord Byron claimed to have made love to 300 different women.  When not copulating, he also wrote industriously – the first part of his masterpiece, Don Juan, the last cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and Beppo.  The latter is a novella in verse, the comic account of a Venetian nobleman, Giuseppe (“Beppo”) captured by the Turks, enslaved, and, then, freed to make a (potentially) inopportune return to the canals and lagoons of his home town.  Beppo arrives home during Carnival, raucous festivities that allow him to prowl around Venice masked and anonymous.  Of course, Beppo’s wife has taken a cavalier servente or cicisebo (this unusual onomatopoeic word means “whisperer”), that is, a gallant courtier that accompanies her to public events such as Mass, concerts, balls and parties and, perhaps, enjoys her favors from time to time.  This useful role was an institution in Venice, as well as other Mediterranean countries, and the convention that husband and cicisebo would be fast friends, united in their mutual devotion to the lady involved, was an enterprise that appealed to Lord Byron for obvious reasons.  In Beppo, the heroine’s husband, dressed ironically as a turbaned Turk, meets his wife and her cavalier during the carnival.  All ends happily.  Beppo is reunited with his wife, although she retains her relationship with the cicisebo, as authorized both by prevailing social mores and the acquiescent husband.  Byron felt that Italian society was more enlightened, and less hypocritical, than the English and makes this point with his jocular tale.  Composed in ottava rima, the narrative poem is often regarded as a rehearsal for the more complex, much longer, and more ambitious Don Juan.

Byron longer poems, particularly those that are satirical and comic, are digressive.  The poet is readily distracted and will go far afield from his narrative to achieve a good gag.  Indeed, much of the pleasure in reading this verse is observing Byron’s high-wire act, stretching the sinews of narrative as far as possible to acquire jokes or make ironic points, without falling and before snapping back to the poem’s argument or plot.  At the outset of Beppo, Lord Byron comments on the austerities of Lent that motivate the licentiousness of carnival (“or farewell to the flesh” as Byron remarks).  A gourmand as well as famous lover, Byron is always interested in food and feasting – he wrote that he traveled to Italy to see “Venice and the Alps and Parmesan cheese.”   In Beppo, he tells us that “(t)hrough Lent they live on fish, both salt and fresh.”  Byron notes that fish served during Lent is poorly seasoned and served without savory or piquant sauce: “To live for forty days on ill-dressed fishes / Because they have no sauces to their stews.”  Protestant travelers to Venice must eat bland-tasting fish, nearly inedible, to which they respond with “poohs and pishes.”  Byron says that these expressions of disgust come “(f)rom travelers accustomed from a boy / To eat their salmon, at least, with soy.”  Therefore, the poet recommends Englishmen planning a vist to Venice during Lent to “buy in grosses” (and have shipped to their destination) “Ketchup, Soy, Chili vinegar, and Harvey / Or, by the Lord, Lent might starve ye.”  

I’m interested in Byron’s mention of “Soy”.  The poet lived in Venice from 1816 to late in 1818 and I was surprised at his casual reference to Soy Sauce as a condiment.  My parents come from Nebraska where they were raised in the 1940's and ‘50's.  Fish was only rarely available on the prairies of central Nebraska and, of course, you had to travel to a big city like Omaha or New York or Minneapolis to find Chinese food.  When I was young, soy sauce was an exotic flavor, something that usually appeared on the table in little packets accompanying take-out chow mein.  Soy sauce was an arcane seasoning, a special treat to be enjoyed with special foods.  I suppose the stuff was available in better grocery stores, but I don’t recall my parents ever having that condiment on hand.  It wasn’t until I was in my thirties that I began to stock soy sauce in my pantry or refrigerator.  Therefore, I was surprised by Byron’s reference to the condiment – along with “ketchup, chili vinegar”and, some substance unknown to me, “Harvey”.  

Soy sauce (jiang-you in Chinese) is a venerable condiment.  In ancient times, salt was scarce and expensive.  Therefore, concoctions were devised to provide salty flavor without using large quantities of the expensive mineral.  Bamboo slips marked with writing and dating to 2200 years ago show that the sauce was brewed and traded in southwest China.  (Evidence for trade in jiang-you was found at the Mawangdui archaeological site near Changsha, China – this is a tomb complex dating to the Western Hang Dynasty about 200 BC to 9 AD.)  Soy sauce is made from fermented soybean paste.  Soy beans with wheat or barley are boiled in brine and, then, exposed to aspergilius oryzae, a fungus that ferments the paste.  This fermentation is said to “saccharify” carbohydrates into the sugars.  The resulting flavor is described by the Japanese word umami, a savory taste for which English has no exactly descriptor.  

The British were trading partners with the Dutch and, incidental to their empire, acquired in London, and other mercantile centers, exotic foodstuffs not otherwise available in Europe – for instance, catsup, an Indian condiment (basically a pickle of chili in vinegar), and various kinds of curry.  Accounting records show that the Dutch East Asia Company, the world’s first joint stock business-entity, headquartered in the Netherlands initiated the European trade in soy sauce.  In 1737, seventy-five barrels of the stuff were shipped from Dejima ,Japan to Batavia, present-day Jakarta, on the island of Japan.  (Dejima, meaning “built island”, was a walled, artificial atoll in Nagasaki harbor that had been a Portuguese trading enclave before becoming Dutch territory – the Japanese were eager to trade with Westerners but didn’t want to contaminate their society with Portuguese or Dutch merchants, and so they were confined to the export markets at Dejima.)  Thirty-five barrels of soy sauce ultimately reached Holland where the condiment proved to be very popular.  At first, Europeans were unable to brew soy sauce because they had no access to the specific fungus used to make the substance.  However, by the end of the 18th century, Europeans had developed fairly good substitutes for Asian soy sauce made with fermented portobello mushrooms. By Byron’s time, London was a funnel through which all the goods in the world flowed and, therefore, he was well acquainted with the stuff.  (Soy sauce was a relative late-comer to American cuisine.  The sauce was first brewed for American consumption in Hawaii in 1909.  When I was growing up, the leading producer of the condiment was La Choy.  This company first marketed soy sauce in the United States in 1933).

 

What is “Harvey sauce”?  This condiment was invented in 1730 by a woman working for Peter Harvey, the proprietor of the Black Dog Inn in Bedfont, Middlesex.  Sometimes called “rotten fish” sauce, the stuff is a variant on the ancient Roman (and Phoenician) condiment called garum made from fermenting anchovies.  If you want to produce Harvey sauce for yourself get six anchovies, mix them with two head of crushed garlic, a pinch of mushroom catsup and three tablespoons of soy sauce.  Let this concoction stand for a few thousand years and you will have piquant “rotting fish” sauce or Harvey (sometimes also called “Lazenby”) sauce.  This product was sold under a bright orange label by the same company that manufactured Worcestershire sauce.  It seems to be unknown today but was very popular in Victorian England – Dickens and Thackeray mention the stuff, Byron obviously liked it, and Mrs. Beeton, the author of a popular cookbook in that period (Mrs. Beeton’s Dictionary of Household Management 1861), recommends the condiment as an ingredient in no less than 26 of her recipes.  Byron enjoyed devising multi-syllable rhymes and seems to be delighted with “starve ye / Harvey.”  As a famous libertine and hedonist, it’s not an accident that he would indulge himself in a list of fish-sauces in his risque verse-tale, Beppo.