Garum, Rome's Fermented Fish Sauce That Never Left
Ancient Rome's most common condiment was rotted fish. Its modern descendants are still in your kitchen.
Roman cookbooks mention garum more often than salt. The 1st-century cookbook attributed to Apicius calls for it in nearly every savory recipe — the fish sauce functioned as a universal seasoning, the way salt and soy sauce share duties today. It was made by layering fish (often mackerel or anchovies) with salt in large clay vats and leaving them in the sun to ferment for months. The resulting liquid was strained and bottled in amphoras stamped with producer names and quality grades.
Archaeologists have identified production facilities, called cetariae, along the coastlines of modern Portugal, Spain, Morocco, and southern France. Pompeii alone had multiple cetariae when Vesuvius buried it in 79 CE. The amphoras recovered from the site include product labels: one reads "liquamen optimum," literally "best fish sauce" — the Roman equivalent of a premium product designation.
Garum's intensity comes from glutamates released as fish proteins break down. It added savory depth without tasting particularly fishy in small quantities — the same reason a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce or a squeeze of anchovy paste transforms a dish without making it taste of fish.
The direct line from garum runs through colatura di alici, a Campanian anchovy sauce still produced in the town of Cetara (the name is not a coincidence) by hanging salted anchovies in chestnut barrels and collecting the drip. Worcestershire sauce, developed by Lea & Perrins in 1837, uses fermented anchovies as its base. Southeast Asian fish sauces replicate the same chemistry through the same basic method. Garum never went away. It just stopped being called that.
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