Garum (fish sauce)

It has long been known to Western culinary experts that there are four ‘taste’  senses (sweet, sour, bitter, and salty)  to tantalise the culinary questing palate. However, in 1909, one Dr. Kikunae Ikeda, a Japanese researcher, discovered that there was, irrefutably, a fifth taste our senses can detect. That extra taste was named ‘Umami' (or the essence of deliciousness), which had its base in ‘Glutamate’ (yes as in mono-sodium glutamate, or MSG which is taken from ‘kombu’, or kelp, an edible seaweed). The research, being in Japanese, was marginalised until nearly one hundred years later (2002) when Western researchers began to take notice of the ‘Umami’ finding.  

Now, culinary experts speak freely about umami as if it had always been there, which of course it had, but unnamed. Umami is the central taste of the West’s latest, and simultaneously oldest, fad - fish sauce which, in its simplest form, is fish (such as anchovies) and salt (which extracts the liquid via osmosis), these are layered in wooden barrels to ferment from a couple months up to a few years and slowly pressed, making a salty, fishy liquid which is used as a condiment and/or in cooking, but sparsely because of the strength of its saltiness. 

Fish sauce, specifically the Thai ‘Squid’ brand fish sauce (established in 1944 by Mr. Tien Chan)  has long been my go to condiment. It was not until recently (while I was looking at a sensory display in the Colchester Castle Museum, Colchester), that my curiosity was piqued about that enormously popular Roman condiment also called ‘fish sauce’. Was there a connection, and what happened to its popularity in the West, I idly wondered.

In Colchester Castle, and elsewhere, I was reminded that the invading Romans (43AD) had brought with them all sorts of strange new things into Britain like figs, cherries, plums, damsons, mulberries, dates, olives, turnips, apples, pears, celery, carrots, cucumbers, asparagus, lentils, pine nuts, almonds, walnuts and sesame as well as coriander, dill and fennel,  grapes, wine and the cultivation of oysters (for which Colchester is now renown) and, wait for it, fish sauce. 

When answering that now infamous Monty Python ‘Life of Brian’ sketch question, concerning what the Romans may or may not have done for us a modern day, gourmet, chef might well answer "fish sauce", or as it was known to the Romans - 'Garum'.  That salt and fish based condiment (originally made from the garus fish) was well known in Greek and Roman kitchens.

There is a current theory that even the very popular SouthEast Asian fish sauces, which are found in countries including Cambodia (‘prahok’, or ‘tuk trey’), Thailand (‘nam-pla’) and Vietnam (‘nuoc-mam’) and the ‘umami uzi’ of Japan,  had their origins in a Roman colony in northern Africa (Carthage), that is according to Mago, a Carthaginian agricultural writer who lived in the fifth/sixth century BC., and in Iran there is mehyawah which is the modern equivalent of the ancient Mesopotamian ‘siqqu’, the Greek ‘garos’ and the Roman garum fish sauces.

In that Colchester Castle Museum, upstairs,  under the label of ‘Learning from Objects’ there is a wooden box containing three wooden containers. They are near a sign urging visitors to 'Please Smell'. Beneath the sign a sentence explains 'The Romans liked strong flavours in their food'. Each container therefore holds a sample of Roman life, one is bayleaf, one is Rosemary and the third contains, yes you've guessed it, the aroma of fish sauce.

Jane Shuter (in her book ‘Life in a Roman Town’, 2005, page 29) mentions that “The Romans used this fish sauce the way many people use tomato paste now. They put a spoonful of it in almost anything they were cooking. They also spread it on warm toast as a snack or a starter before a meal.”

Gaius Plinius Secundus, also called Pliny the Elder, a Roman author, naturalist and natural philosopher, as well as a naval and army commander of the early Roman Empire, in his ‘The Natural History’ (AD 77), remarks ….

“At the present day, however, the most esteemed kind of garum is that prepared from the scomber, in the fisheries of Carthago Spartaria:it is known as "garum of the allies," and for a couple of congii we have to pay but little less than one thousand sesterces. Indeed, there is no liquid hardly, with the exception of the unguents, that has sold at higher prices of late; so much so, that the nations which produce it have become quite ennobled thereby. There are fisheries, too, of the scomber on the coasts of Mauretania and at Carteia in Bætica, near the Straits which lie at the entrance to the Ocean; this being the only use that is made of the fish. For the production of garum, Clazomenæ is also famed, Pompeii, too, and Leptis; while for their muria, Antipolis, Thurii, and of late, Dalmatia, enjoy a high reputation.”

Some time, over the centuries, fish sauce had declined in popularity in the West.  Some say that it was because of taxes the Romans imposed, the frequent assailing of fishing ports by various marauders, making the production of fish sauce increasingly difficult and, not to mention, the general decline of the Roman Empire. 

However, one small town in Italy (the fishing village of Cetara, Campania) has clung on to that particular gastronomic item from the once glorious Roman past. Its version of fish sauce had been recreated by the Cistercian Monks of Amalfi and is called  'Colatura di alici' (Anchovy Drippings), while  a recently recreated Spanish fish sauce (2017)  ‘Flor de Garum’ (Flower of Garum)  is made from an ancient 3rd century A.D.  recipe recreated from findings at Pompeii after it was entombed by the Vesuvius eruption in 79 A.D. At present the Italian and Spanish fish sauces are not commonly available in Britain, but there are many brands from South East Asia which can be found in specialist shops, such as those in London’s Chinatown and at least two of Colchester’s ‘Asian’ stores.

American Vietnamese writer Viet Thanh Nguyen (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) has this to say about his favourite condiment in his 2016, Grove Press, novel “The Sympathizer”... 

“Oh, fish sauce! How we missed it, dear Aunt, how nothing tasted right without it, how we longed for the grand cru of Phu Quoc Island and its vats brimming with the finest vintage of pressed anchovies! This pungent liquid condiment of the darkest sepia hue was much denigrated by foreigners for its supposedly horrendous reek, lending new meaning to the phrase “there’s something fishy around here,” for we were the fishy ones. We used fish sauce the way Transylvanian villagers wore cloves of garlic to ward off vampires, in our case to establish a perimeter with those Westerners who could never understand that what was truly fishy was the nauseating stench of cheese. What was fermented fish compared to curdled milk?”.

Gourmands and gourmet chefs around the world are eagerly  promoting the umami taste and, in particular, the salty, sharp fish sauce taste. As well as the aforementioned brands for fish sauce, there is one fish sauce which seems to appeal to gourmet needs for a clear, tasty and somewhat elite condiment, and that is Red Boat 40° N Fish Sauce. That sauce is advertised as being “Made from black anchovies caught off the crystal clear waters of Vietnam’s Phu Quoc archipelago”  it is a ‘single-press’ and  ‘barrel-aged’ condiment using “a centuries-old fermentation tradition”. In fact this sauce has all the mystery and romance of the East you might need of a sauce made from the fermentation of fish into liquid.