Rotting fish innards ...

Garum. That wonderful concoction of rotting fish guts that ancient Romans of all social ranks loved. Sounds awful, but basically it was Vietnamese fish sauce, Nucmam, which is actually quite tastey.

There is a TV show in Britain that attempts to recreate ancient and medieval foods. Here is the Times Online's review of it, and here is what the review has to say about nucmam, er, garum.

He did rather well with the Roman staple of garum -- their favourite sauce made out of rotten fish which,

as Heston pointed out, they seem to have smeared over most things. It is this that usually defeats undergraduate Roman dinner parties (anchovy paste doesn't quite get it). But even if Heston didnt have the patience to rot his fish for the three months that the Romans did, he did manage to heat up and blend together a load of mackerel intestines, so that they ended looking rather like a Thai sauce and was (so Heston insisted) really 'delicious'.

And then there is the roast pig with the faux guts falling out of it to disgust the guests - funny people those Romani.

in at least one brach of the Clemens clan nucmam is a staple.