The Romans used mackerel to make garum, a fermented fish sauce similar to fish sauce.

According to a 1^st century BC Roman poet Martial, the preparation of garum involved securing “the blood of a still-gasping mackerel,” which was mixed with salt, and left to ferment for as long as three months. As well as mackerel, prawns, sardines, anchovies, tuna, salmon, red mullet and oysters were used. There is a temptation to think of all this as little more than a mess of rotting fish but the use of the word fermentation should tell us that there is more going on. It was important to use fresh fish. Enzymes in the gut of the fish reacted with the salt, producing an acrid and potent smelling brine. There were different grades of garum with some writers having mackerel as producing the best with tuna second.

The fermentation took two to three months and was carried out on an almost industrial scale. The importance of salt meant concentrated in areas where there were salt pans – Barcelona  was famous for its garum.

The residual liquid was strained off, and carefully bottled and sealed. The result? A condiment similar to the Thai fish sauce you can now buy in most supermarkets and the acrid, foul smelling prawn paste it is sometimes possible to buy from Siam food markets. I once had a block of this I kept in a plastic container in the back of the fridge. It hid there for years, to be taken out occasionally if I was making a curry. Lifting the lid would release the smell, dark, pungent and peaty. Only a small piece was ever required and its taste would sit deep in the background of the dish adding an earthy fecund, grunt to the flavour.

The mackerel was well known to the ancients, and those taken near the Island of Paros were particularly celebrated. The famous fish-sauce called garum, made from their entrails, was invented by the Greeks. 

Closer to home we have Worcester Sauce, made from rotten anchovies, producing the same deepening of flavour to a shepherd’s pie or dish of macaroni cheese.

It was a bloody business and one writer in Blackwoods Magazine  about 1870 saw it was the fish-wife’s revenge: “When gutting is at its height their hands, their neck, their busts, their “dreadful faces thronge’d, and fiery arms”, their every bit about them, fore and aft, are spotted and besprinkled with little scarlet clots of gills and guts. A bob down to slice a herring and a bob up to throw it into the basket and the job is done. These ruthless widows seize upon the dead herrings with such a fierceness as almost to denote revenge for their husband’s deaths – victims of the herring lottery – and the widows scatter about the gills and guts as if they had no bowels of compassion”.

Business in Deep Waters

You need a sharp knife and be prepared to get your hands bloody.

It is best to do this by the rock pools down by the beach. They are perfect for washing down the fish once you are done and well placed for the seagulls that will start to gather a minute or two after you start.

Take a fish in your left hand belly up and head pointing away from you. Put the point of the knife in the small hole towards the tail of the fish, properly known as its vent, and when the blade has torn the skin move it gently with a slight sawing motion towards the head, slitting open its belly until you get to the pectoral fins beneath the head. Take the knife carefully between these fins pulling it out just before the gills.  As you are doing all this be careful not to go too far into the gut cavity.

With your fingers draw out the guts, ideally in one ferreting motion, from the head back down to the vent, making sure to take everything out, then push your thumb hard up against the back bone and run it down forcing against the nail the black line of blood that lies there and clearing out any residue of gut. A Guide to filleting mackerel produced for the Billingsgate Seafood Training School tells you not to use your bare hands for this and to put on surgical gloves. But you will be on holiday, flush with the success of your catch, there will be a pint to hand and your hands should already be bloody from the killing of them in the boat. You can always clean up in the sea.

It can be instructive to take a look at what you are pulling out. Mackerel are indiscriminate eaters cruising the dark waters mouth wide open, all part of one vast pack, taking in plankton, sprat and baby squid. Sometimes as the bloody gob of gut lies in your hand they can be seen undigested and perfectly formed as if they had only been taken from the sea a few moments before.  Look closely and the sprat maybe a baby mackerel, only an inch or so long but otherwise the perfect copy of the fish you are holding in your other hand, its tiger stripes and colour still vibrant back in the sun-light. This last year as a line of mackerel was spilling into the bottom of the boat one of them hawked out a small sprat its skin abraded by the sharp teeth of its devourer.

Throw the guts for the gulls.

You may have to wait a minute or two before they realise you are there. But one will be flying on its determined straight line out to sea and will swerve off course when it sees you, or another will catch what is going on from its perch on one of the lights on the pier. Rather than keeping the news to itself it will hawk back its head and broadcast a triumphant cry to all and sundry that there are guts to be had and soon there will be a dozen or so circling overhead ready to take their fill from the water, the air filling with the sound of their bark and bray, the birds reeling up and then down in a rush to the water, sharp yellow beaks snatching through the flurrying wings before pulling away. If one has been particularly greedy it will be chased on its way back to Owen Island and if inexperienced forced to cough up its meal back to the sea for it to be gobbled down by its stronger pursuer.

Wash out the fish in one of the pools making sure you get ride of any residue of blood.

It was over cast and wet at The Secret Gardens of Oxton and I had forgotten my camera so you are spared the pictures of Morris Dancing. Someone kindly pointed out that most of them had beards not dissimilar to mine. Like any man I like to carry and occasionally wave a big stick but should you ever catch me attaching bells to it and my knees then please wrap me up in straitjacket and have me taken away.

For those who don’t know The Secret Gardens in a Sunday in May when 25/30 gardens in Oxton village open themselves up to the public. This provides an excellent opportunity to nose. It is not often that you can walk into a total strangers back garden, pad across their lawn and get to see what they are doing with their veg patch and, more importantly, what papers have they got lying across the kitchen table. Because most of the kitchens look out over the garden. And if it is not a kitchen there will be a nice summer room to be looked into.

People must spend months getting their garden ready for the big day but you suspect that with some of the houses almost as much thought goes into what can be left lying around to send out the right message to all those strangers peering in.

The other small pernicious pleasure is spotted the odd clump of ground elder which tells me that someone else is spending as much time as I do in trying to keep the stuff at bay.

This year I only had time time for a couple of gardens along Victoria Mount. I came back jealous at the size of their greenhouses and the neat and ordered raised beds in their veg gardens.

There was nothing to be done in our garden as the rain came down and revision fever continued inside.

It is always going to be difficult to resist a packet of rook’s breast once spotted. They are only available for a short six week season around May. It is only the breast that is eaten and they are either shot or plucked from a nest by someone intrepid enough to climb up a tree and into the depths of a rookery to do it.

To go with them I bought a good piece of bread and a bag of mixed salad. I made a dressing for the salad with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and some hot red currant sauce I found in the back of the frisge. The red currant sauce looked like it had been there some some time and was hard with sugar crystals.

The rook breasts took as long to took as it took me to mix the dressing into the salad and arrange it on a plate and then slice the bread into thick chunks. There were six breasts and I seasoned them lightly with salt and pepper and turned them once. Once cooked I put them on to of the salad and breads and poured over the remaining juices in the pan.

They were not dissimilar to pigeon breast although perhaps not as livery. I will certainly have them again.

I was alone as I ate them listening to the New Zealand dream pop of The Phoenix Foundation.