By Dimitra Mylona and Roxani Margariti.
We can’t travel far these days, but there’s still the travel shows, past and present (well, mostly past!) reminding us of the opportunities and delights travel offers. Food is a chief feature of the travel experience and of getting to know and appreciate other cultures.
In pre-modern times travel by sea and along shores has left some of the most vivid accounts of past life and society. Fish-eating was inevitably something to observe, record and often enjoy.
Our first joint post is about travelers, both reporting on and delighting in fish: Archestratus and Ibn Battuta. Different origins, different times, different travels, yet sharing enough for the comparison to be instructive. Any similarities to modern cooking/traveling shows are not coincidental!
Archestratus from Gela and the craze about luxury eating
Archestratus, lived in Gela, Sicily, and he is known for his infamous poem called “A Life of Luxury.” He wrote it in the 4th century BC and it was an unusual poem at the time. Archestratus chose to write in a mock epic style, well out of fashion in his day.
He copied the style of Homer and Hesiod, but instead of mighty heroic feats or men’s virtuous toils over their farmsteads.
Archestratus spoke of harbour cities and the culinary delights they offered to the sophisticated traveler. He spoke mostly of fish and other seafood, and not about everyday foods such as lentils and chickpeas. He wrote about luxurious, distinguished eating.
In those days, literary works like this were not meant to be read in the tranquillity of one’s study.
They were meant to be read aloud and discussed at the symposium, after eating, while the symposiasts were drinking wine and eating little bites of sweet or savoury delights, the so called trogalia. At the same symposia more serious works were also read, but when the wine flowed and the mood lifted, it was not time for serious philosophical ruminations! Instead, travelling, superb eating and provocative language such as that of Archestratus were probably more appropriate.
“A Life of Luxury”
Archestratus was not only talking about far-away places and culinary experiences, he was, in a way, provoking readers to ignore the teachings of moderation, which lay at the core of the Greek mentality and to abandon themselves in a life of unrestrained luxury! He noted, for example, that on Rhodes island you could find thresher shark (Alopias vulpinus) to die for. So much so that if fishmongers refused to sell it to you, you should steal it. No normal rules should prevent the connoisseur from tasting it!
Archestratus ate his way along the coasts of Italy, Aegean and the Black Sea and he had advise to give to those visiting the same harbour towns. He thought that in Reggio Calabria you could find the best eels, but superb eels were also to be found in Strymon river and Kopais lake, where they were tasty and particularly large and thick in body. In Amvrakia and Pella chromis were best, more so in summer when they were fatty. Especially at Amvrakia, the mysterious (unknown to us) kapros (hog) was worth going after. Parrot fish and the winter red mullets were excellent at Ephesus while at Sicyon conger eels were best. Small fish were generally deplorable with one, or rather two, exceptions: the small fry from Phaleron near Athens was really worth eating, deep fried and sizzling just out of the pan. The Rhodian small fry was also good.
But when visiting Rhodes you could also try a rather unusual sea dish: fried sea anemones (this dish is still eaten in Volos, and the anemones are called kollitsianoi).
Dion, at the time much closer to the sea, just like Pella (both inland now), was famous for its squid, Lake Volvi for its gray mullets and sea bass, Torone for the belly of shark and Olynthus for the heads of glaucus (probably the bluefish, Pomatomus saltator). Some places had a reputation for their tuna. Sicily was one and Byzantium too, particularly a special product called horaion.
What Archestratus describes in his idiosyncratic manner was knowledge that people in his day could relate to. His list of geographically specific excellent fish and fish products was to a large degree common knowledge among the symposiasts who read his poem. Bites of some of those species might even be on their table. Tuna from Sicily and Byzantium and the eels from Srymon river and the Kopais lake found their way to the markets of the Greek world and echoes of the reputation of all other harbours that are mentioned in the “Life of Luxury” are found in the works of other authors too.
Ibn Battuta and his travel log in the Islamicate world
In terms of travels and sensibilities, Ibn Battuta may at first blush strike you as the very antithesis of Archestratus. In 1325, he set off from his native Tangier on a pious journey: he was driven by the desire to perform the hajj and “seek knowledge,” a meritorious act modelled on the Prophet Muhammad’s famous hadith “travel in search of knowledge even if the quest takes you to China.” Although Mecca was his declared destination, Ibn Battuta ended up travelling for almost 25 years and visiting just about every corner of the Islamicate world and then some, from Morocco to China, and from the Central Asian steppes to Sub-Saharan East and West Africa. He then composed a travel account that was to become the best-known example of medieval Arabic travel writing. Describing and celebrating the reach and diversity of Islamic culture was his main concern. Moreover, performing his learned Muslim identity and quite unlike Archestratus, he frequently criticized people for not upholding moral standards and self-righteously enjoined hosts and fellow travellers to follow ritual, ethical and legal rules—conveniently, as interpreted by himself!
But Ibn Battuta’s Gift for those Contemplating the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travels, just like Archestratus’s Life of Luxury, was meant to both instruct and entertain. Moreover, Ibn Battuta unabashedly enjoyed the good things in life—sex, fine clothing, and good food among them! He freely, if “correctly” indulged, and delicious fish and fish dishes helpfully caught his eye—helpful indeed, because although we can reasonably conjecture that fish and seafood were an important part of diets on the shores and islands he visited across 14th-century Afro-Eurasia, direct accounts of pescaterianism and fishing practices are generally scarce (more on this in future posts!).
The Egyptian Buri, the the Perso-Arabian shir mahi and other delights
Although the son of a maritime city on the edge of the western Islamicate world (Tangier!), Ibn Battuta was still a landlubber who had not travelled by sea before he set off on his long journey. This combination of awareness and inexperience perhaps explains his rather frequent attention to fish and fishing.
He first comments on fish while visiting Egypt, where he mentions it as one of the bountiful resources of the Nile Delta, along with delicious buffalo milk products, fatty sea-fowl, abundant sheep and goat, bananas and other fruit. The fish species he names is buri, a mullet with transregional and diachronic appeal—Ibn Battuta tells us that it was exported to Cairo but also Syria and Anatolia and there are several videos to enjoy on the subject of fasikh buri, the aged and salted variety popular in Egypt today. Buri is also the name he gives to what must have been a different fish altogether and the fishing of which he witnessed half way down the Red Sea coast on his very first sea voyage. From there he reports the “marvel” of what sounds like a kind of beach seining technique: during high tide and using a “length of cloth which they tied by its ends,” he tells us, the local population caught a multitude of fish which they then broiled—presumably for the hungry and salivating travellers!
As he travelled further along Indian Ocean shores, he did not lose his interest in fish and fishing. More species of fish appear in his narrative, including lukham (shark) and the first-rate fish that he glosses as shir mahi (literally “lion fish” in Persian, but not to be mistaken for the poisonous lionfish of the pterois genus that invades Mediterranean waters today). The latter he compares to the Atlantic tazzart (seer-fish, kingfish, mackerel, or tuna). He also offers regional culinary notes, such as the combination of fish with dates, both as a shipboard staple and in a dish fit for royalty on the island of Jarun or New Hormuz. From there too, he reports that the skull of a giant fish—a whale!—formed a curious urban landmark, one which would not have been out of place in Melvillian Nantucket or New Bedford.
His enthusiasm about fish does have its limits. At the bazaar of Zayla in modern-day Somaliland, he recoils at the smell of fish (perhaps because it was combined with that of camel blood!). At Dhofar, he reports the practice of using sardine as animal fodder and his nose is similarly offended. More seriously offensive to him, however, is the consumption of seabirds that have not been ritually slaughtered. Having witnessed this practice on board a vessel along the shores of Oman, he reports his distaste and self-righteously chastises a shipboard companion for it. While it’s perhaps a pity that he could not resist embarrassing his fellow travellers, we should be grateful to him for attesting to the eating of sea fowl (and their eggs) along Arabian shores in the 14th century! On this score, his testimony dovetails nicely with that of another fascinating (if far less judgmental!) Muslim traveler: reporting from the southern Red Sea about a century earlier, Ibn al-Mujawir uses the Quranic word for divinely procured manna (salwa) to describe the feasting of Farasan islanders on the abundant sea fowl alighting on their shores.
Quranic teachings that the sea and its bounties constitute God’s gift to humans informs Ibn Battuta’s relationship to the oceanic realm. It also colors his experience as well as his reading of the littoral geographies he traverses in his travels. While visiting a Muslim hermitage near Abadan, he reports another marvelous fishing story, this time with an explicit supernatural dimension: a saintly shaykh who lives in the hinterland descends to the shore once a month, casts his nets, and lands a catch that provides until his next visit. When the shaykh singles out our traveler by offering him a delicious fresh fish from this catch, Ibn Battuta is so smitten—by the spiritual potency of his saintly host but apparently also by the deliciousness of the best fish he ever tasted!—that for a moment he considers staying there forever. Fortunately for us, stay he did not, but continued his travels and wondrous descriptions…
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