Fish and yogurt versus cucumber and yogurt
Some years ago I remember reading a discussion of fish and yogurt, I believe in the food history journal Petits Propos Culinaires. The question was why in the Middle East fish was rarely or never cooked with yogurt. The suggested answer was that since in the humoral system fish was cold, the last thing you wanted to do was to exacerbate this by adding yogurt, also cold in the humoral system.
So as I was making a cucumber and yogurt salad last night I pondered this. Cucumber is clearly cold. We still say “cool as a cucumber” in English. Yet salads and sauces of yogurt and cucumber are favorites from Greece to India.
Hypothesis. In this case you want to accentuate the coldness because the whole thing is an accompaniment to something hot or because you yourself need cooling down (all humorally of course).
But I am just speculating at second hand. Does anyone have any direct evidence?
Charles Perry commented that Medieval Arabic cookery doesn’t seem to have the same absolute belief that it is unhealthy to consume fish and yoghurt at the same meal and gives 3-4 recipes for fish with yoghurt (or similar product).
From a humoral point of view, I think that the main problem with fish is not so much that it is cooling, but that it is also “moist”, so there were a lot of recipes that processed it to counter act this, not sure if yoghurt fit into these cooking methods.
A lot of Fish doesn’t seem to very high status dish either, so I wonder if this played a part.
Thanks Adam. I’d missed that Charles Perry comment. Is it in his Medieval Arab Cookery?
On cool and moist, I’ve always assumed that the techniques to counteract the one tend to also counteract the other. And conversely that something like yogurt that is cool and moist would accentuate both. Am I missing something?
I agree entirely that the status of fish goes up and down. But I’m not sure why if it were low status that would mean it was not cooked with yogurt (assuming it wasn’t cooked with yogurt which as you say may be wrong). Was this because yogurt was expensive?
OK. Basically there are four elements (Earth, Fire, Air and Water). Everything is made from these. There are also four qualities or states, hot and cold, dry and moist. The former two are active, the latter two passive.
In living things (and therefore food) these qualities or states were combined to form “humours”; Black Bile (cold and dry), Yellow Bile (warm and dry), Blood (warm and moist) and Phlegm (cold and moist).
These humours were also applied to archetypal temperament types; “Melancholic”, “Choleric”, “Sanguine” and “Phlegmatic”. These types were thought to vary with age (more sanguine when young, phlegmatic when old), sex, race, geographic location etc etc.
The job of a medic was to balance out all these to produce a healthy person. In terms of diet, the stomach (or digestion in general) was meant to be hot to function correctly.
So if you were an old man it could be very unhealthy to eat raw oysters as they were very phlegmatic and really at this point in like you needed something a little more spicey to aid digestion (literally).
Having said that, this is the bare outlines and people really agreed on what was healthy or not. In general fish were cool and moist, but some were cooler and moister then others and in some cases were more cool and dry. To counter act the phlegmatic nature of fish you were often advised to fry or bake it. On the other hand a lot fish was either salted or dried so wasn’t really phlegmatic anymore. To get around this a lot of authors simply say that these items are “hard to digest” without any real reference to the humours.
On top of this was the fact that this system was used by Christians who ate fish a lot of the time, not a consideration when the system was developed and Muslims who were not so bothered by fish v flesh. So a whole bunch of different opinions about the same food stuffs using the same (or similar) humoural system.
“Salads” (in fact most fruit and veg in general) were considered to be almost deadly in some circles as they were so phlegmatic. However, as the point of a salad was that it was phlegmatic, if you wanted one the a cucumber was one of the best. An in addition to being cool and moist, it also had a whole bunch of other medical properties, that for some made it an excellent choice. So I think that cucumber and yoghurt is fine as it is meant to be cool and moist (if this is still a problem add mint and garlic which are warm and dry to balance it).
Fish on the other hand, especially in cultures that are not so keen on fish, could be more of a problem. A really phlegmatic fish (!), which is hard to digest would be a disaster to serve with yoghurt. Better to fry is and add some salt, garlic and parsley to make it much more warm and dry (lemons are cool and dry, so a bit risky to add some, but hell sometimes you have to live a little on the edge).
Hi Adam,
Thanks for that long and admirably clear exposition of the humoral system. I take it that the bottom line is that, yes, a yogurt and cucumber sauce is designed to be a cool, moist corrective to whatever else it is you are eating.
Continued after an interruption. I think, and I’m sure you know all this too, there were senses of hard to digest that could be explicated. One was the length of time to pass through the system which I don’t think was a matter of the humors. And maybe related or maybe not, Celsus has this long discussion of hard and soft foods that seems to be orthogonal to the humoral system. Hard foods are hard to digest but sustain you for a long time. Those were what strong, manly Republican soldiers ate.
Somewhat offtopic but does yogurt predate the invasion of Central Asian Turks in the middle east? i saw a recipe for yogurt soup from Urartu on youtube. Was wondering how accurate that was.
I really don’t know. All kinds of fermented milks around the world. Hoping to be really active and able to answer questions again in September.