Fish Sauce

History

The Greeks got there early. By the fourth or third century BC they were making garos from fish scraps ¹. National Geographic traces the idea further, to Greek and Phoenician cooks, with garum residue turning up in amphorae from fifth-century BC shipwrecks ².

Then Rome went all in. Romans called it garum or liquamen, and made it by layering fish guts from anchovies, mackerel, whitebait and tuna with salt and herbs, then leaving the lot in the sun for months ². Get the salt wrong and it rots; get it right and it ferments ². Strain off the liquid and you have garum. The sludge left behind, allec, went to cheaper tables ².

The smell was so bad that factories, called cetariae, sat outside towns ²⁴. Spain's Andalusian coast was the powerhouse, with Baelo Claudia near the Strait of Gibraltar catching tuna as they migrated ². The best stuff, garum sociorum made from mackerel at Carthago Nova, cost a fortune, and Pliny the Elder compared its scent to fine perfume ². Seneca was less charmed and called it an "expensive bloody mass of decayed fish" ⁴. Amphorae have turned up from Monte Testaccio in Rome all the way to Hadrian's Wall ².

The best garum story comes from Pompeii. Aulus Umbricius Scaurus, a freed slave who grew rich on fish sauce, laid a mosaic floor in his atrium showing jars of his product, a Roman billboard you walked across ². When Vesuvius buried his house, jars of garum went with it. Scientists led by Annamaria Ciarallo studied the fish bones left in seven jars and found bogue, a fish caught in July and early August. With a month to ferment, that pointed to the traditional eruption date of 24 August 79 AD ³.

After Rome fell, garum faded in the West, though Byzantine and Arab cooks kept using it ⁴. Its closest living relative in Europe is colatura di alici, an anchovy sauce from Italy's Campania coast ⁴.

In Asia, Chinese records from about 2,300 years ago describe fermented fish condiments, some mixed with soybeans ¹. By around 50 to 100 BC fish sauce had taken off in Southeast Asia while China moved towards soy ¹. Food scholars call this the "bean-fish divide": fermented beans in the north-east, fermented fish in the south-east ¹. In Vietnam the tradition traces back some 300 years to the Champa kingdom, and Phu Quoc and Phan Thiet are the famous names ¹.

Here is the fun bit. The Hokkien word for a fish brine, kê-tsiap or kôe-chiap, may be the root of "ketchup" ¹⁷. British traders met it in the 1600s and 1700s; the word first shows up in English in 1682, and British cooks made it from mushrooms long before tomatoes took over ⁷. Your burger sauce has a fishy family tree.