Garum Fish Sauce and Spices in Ancient Rome | Early European History And Religion

SPICES IN ANCIENT ROME

Romans spiced their food with pine kernels, leeks, celery seeds, parsley, lovage, dried mint, safflower, coriander, dates, honey, raisin wine and broth. Several towns were famous for their condiment factories. Perhaps the most common flavoring additive was vinegar. Spoiled wine was used as vinegar (acetum), and vinegar that became insipid and tasteless was called vappa. This latter word was used also as a term of reproach for shiftless and worthless men. Wealthy Romans sometimes ate their food with elaborate sauces and spices. They called this “city eating." By the 1st century B.C., Romans were obtaining spices from India.

The Roman gardener gave great attention, too, to the raising of green stuffs that could be used for salads. Among these the sorts most often mentioned are cress and lettuce, with which we are familiar, and the mallow, no longer used for food. Plants in great variety were cultivated for seasoning. Poppy seed was eaten with honey as a dessert, or was sprinkled over bread before baking. Anise, cumin, fennel, mint, and mustard were raised everywhere. Besides these seasonings that were found in every kitchen garden, spices were brought in large quantities from the East, and rich men imported vegetables of large sizes or finer quality than could be raised at home. Honey took the place of sugar on the table and in cooking, for the Romans had only a botanical knowledge of the sugar cane. Vinegar was made from grapes. [Source: “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932)]

The stems of laserpithium, an herb from North Africa, were incredibly popular. Laserpithium was roasted as a vegetable and squeezed to get juices used as a flavoring. It was the chief export from Libya and one of the primary spoils of the Punic wars. Within two centuries it was consumed to extinction.

Spices were among the most valuable commodities carried on the Silk Road. Without refrigeration food spoiled easily and spices were important for masking the flavor of rancid or spoiled meat. Basil, mint, sage, rosemary and thyme cold be grown in family herb gardens in Europe along with medicinal plants. Among the the spices and seasonings that came from the East — affordable to merchants and burghers but not ordinary people — were pepper, cloves, mace and cumin. Ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon and saffron — the most valuable of spices from the East — were worth more than their weight in gold.

Spices such as cinnamon and pepper that were known in ancient Rome and traded on the Silk Road originated from India and the East Indies. Pliny wrote of how cinnamon and other spices from Indonesia reached Rome via Madagascar and East Africa. By the A.D. 1st century, spices were making their way to China and India and from there taken by ship and Silk Road caravans to Europe.

Common Spices in Antiquity

Garlic was consumed by the ancient Egyptians. The pyramid builders ate lot of it, along with onions. One of the first recorded strikes occurred when laborers’ garlic ration was reduced. A slave could be bought for seven kilograms of it. Garlic was also consumed by the ancient Greeks and Romans., although the Romans regarded it as a food for the lower classes. Roman legions wore garlic on their bodies to ward off colds. The Romans gave garlic to laborers who did dangerous jobs to give them courage.

The Romans and Greeks regarded garlic and leeks as aphrodisiacs. Truffles, artichokes and oysters were also associated with sexuality. Anise-tasting fennel was popular with Greeks who thought it made a man strong. The Romans thought it improved eyesight.

Ginger was a popular spice in ancient Greece and Rome. Ginger shakers were often placed on the table along with those for salt and pepper. The word "ginger" came to mean spices in general. Ginger is one of the earliest spices known in Western Europe. It was imported from India as far back as Greek times.

The ancient Egyptians chewed cardamom as a tooth cleaner. The Greeks and Romans used it as perfume. Vikings who traveled through Russia to Constantinople brought it back to Scandinavia, where it remains popular today. Arabs ascribed aphrodisiac qualities to it and cardamon is mentioned a number of times in the Arabian Nights.

Cloves and nutmeg were considered appetite stimulants by the Romans. The ancient Greeks grew sage and used cumin, thyme, coriander and poppy seeds in their cooking. They considered parsley to be too sacred to eat and the Romans set the precedent of using it as garnish, so it could be used over and over. Pliny believed that pepper was a stimulant. Cloves were delivered to the Romans from present-day Indonesia by Arab traders and prized as a medicament in medieval times.

The Romans were nuts about honey. It was added to all sorts of things. Sugar arrived in Europe during the medieval era. It was initially used mainly as a sweetener for medicine. Honey was the primary sweetener in Roman times.

Salt in Ancient Rome

garum fish sauce container

Salt was highly valued. Both the Greeks and Romans salted their sacrificial animals before their throats were cut. The Roman empire's major highway was the Via Salaria (Salt Road), on which salt was carried from the salt pans of Ostia to Rome. Salt was at first obtained by the evaporation of sea water, but was afterwards mined, Its manufacture was a monopoly of the government, and care was taken always to keep the price low. It was used not only for seasoning, but also as a preservative agent.

The expression "worth their salt" comes from Rome where soldiers were paid a salarium (salary) to buy salt. A number of other words come from the Latin word for salt. The word “salad” is derived from the fact that Romans liked salt with their vegetables. “Salacious” comes from the Latin word salax, which means a man in love or literally “in the salted state."

Salt from the Dead Sea was shipped all over the Mediterranean. Meat was preserved by "salting," a process that required large quantities of pepper in addition to salt to counteract the "unpalatable effects of the salt itself."

In June 2015, archaeologists work in the ancient city of Kaunos in present-day Turkey announced that they had unearthed a 2,000 year-old, Roman-era saltpan. The ancient city, which dates back to 3,000 years ago, is located in the Dalyan neighborhood in the western province of Mugla’s Ortaca district. A team headed by Professor Cengiz Isik said during the course of the work they had discovered an area where salt was produced.[Source: Hurriyet Daily, June 12, 2015]

According to the Hurriyet Daily: Harmandar said the ancient city of Kaunos was a center of trade and civilization in the past, and excavations and scientific studies showed that the locals earned great income from salt production in the region. The deputy head of Kaunos excavations, Assistant Professor Ufuk Çörtük, said Kaunos had a very significant position among Anatolian cities and 48 salt platforms and four channels had been unearthed in the ancient saltpan facility.

Çörtük said the ancient facility was located on a narrow sand dune on Inceburun Hill behind Iztuzu beach, adding the production of salt was an irreplaceable part of social and economic life in the city. He told the Hurriyet Daily: “It is reported in the ‘customs regulations’ inscription, which was found in the ancient site, that Kaunos salt was one of the most important export articles of the city. In order to boost trade with Kaunos, Roman Emperor Hadrian needed to take some incentive measures regarding the customs regulations. These regulations didn’t compromise only two products; salt is one of them.”

Çörtük said salt was the most desired product in Kaunos because salt was considered a health product for the eyes. According to ancient era writer Plinius, salt was used for insect stings because of its purifying, dissolvent and caustic features, adding the writer mentioned both the Salt Lake and Kaunos in regards to salt production.

Pepper in Ancient Rome

Pepper was also widely used in ancient Rome and quite valuable as it originated from India. The best Roman cookbooks required pepper for nearly every recipe. Pliny believed that pepper was a stimulant. In the first century A.D, the satirist Persius wrote:
“The greedy merchants, led by lucre, run
To the parch'd Indies and the rising sun;
From thence hot Pepper and rich Drugs they bear,
Bart'ring for Spices their Italian ware . . ."

Today, Pepper is the world's most commonly used spice. It accounts for 60 percent of the spice trade and comes from the dried berry (peppercorn) of the “Piper nigrum” , a climbing vine that originated in the tropical forests of the Malabar coast of the southwestern India and was introduced from there to other tropical places.

Pepper, one of the spices that Columbus was looking for when he landed in the America in 1492, had been coming to Europe along the Silk Road at least since Roman times, when many Roman cookbook recipes called for pepper.

Garum — the Fermented Fish Sauce That Romans Love

garum amphorae in Pompeii

Romans were especially fond of garum — a sauce made by fermenting salted fish intestines. A a mainstay of banqueting tables and street food stands across the Roman empire, the sauce was highly prized for its nutritional qualities and was also a rich source of monosodium glutamate — a compound widely used in the food industry today as a flavour enhancer.Liquamen, a similar sauce, was made from rotting fish guts, vinegar, oil, and pepper. Variants of the sauce were used on fish and fowl as far back as 300 B.C. It was said to be an aphrodisiac. Among the recipes discovered at Pompeii were mushrooms with honey-and-liquamen sauce, soft-boiled eggs with pine kernels and liquamen sauce, and venison with caraway seeds, honey and liquamen sauce.

Garum was arguably the most sought-after foodstuff of the Roman era Amanda Borschel-Dan wrote in the Times of Israel: While the idea of fermented fish sauce or garum may not spark salivation in modern palates, the slimy stuff was considered one of the most delicious flavors of the Roman Empire. According to Erickson-Gini, the precious goop added both salty and savory flavors to food and was used in the vast majority of recipes known from the era. “I think of it as a condiment, but it went well beyond that,” Erickson-Gini said. “It’s hard for us to imagine. It was far more common than ketchup.” [Source: Amanda Borschel-Dan, Times of Israel, December 16, 2019]

Roman historian Pliny the Elder mentions the sauce throughout his “Natural History,” both as a foodstuff and as medicine. According to a recent National Geographic article on garum, Pliny “extols garum as a cure for dysentery and an effective treatment for dog bites. Pliny also recommended it for earaches, and believed that consuming African snails marinated in garum would ward off stomach troubles.”

The National Geographic article states that the sauce was considered so essential to the Roman diet “that a huge network of trade routes grew up to move the prized relish from fishery to plate. Like many delicacies today, the finest garum could sell for astronomical sums.” Even in the storerooms of 1st century B.C. King Herod’s isolated Masada palace, a rare labeled amphorae of garum was found that was possibly imported from Andalusia.

There are several types of garum, and even a strictly kosher version called garum castimonarium that was guaranteed to be made from kosher fish, not shellfish. The height of the garum fad was circa the 2nd century CE, but its use is recorded even much later.

Did Pompeii Garum Have an Umami Taste

Umami is a Japanese word referring to the so-called fifth taste — a rich and savory category of food taste (besides sweet, sour, salt, and bitter), corresponding to the flavour of glutamates, especially monosodium glutamate, and particularly associated with some fish products. Some say garum has an umami taste. It’s salty and a little spicy, and Pompeiians, rich and poor, put it on everything — like “ancient ketchup,” archaeobotanist Chiara Comegna told National Geographic History.[Source: Christina Sterbenz, National Geographic, August 1, 2023]

Christina Sterbenz wrote; Flavor-wise garum is similar to Thai or Vietnamese fish sauce, according to the Pompeii Food and Drink Project.“Imagine if your diet, particularly if you're a poor person, is just grits every day. What will you do to spice up that meal and improve the nutritional content?” says Benedict Lowe, a professor of history at the University of North Alabama, who served on the Pompeii Food and Drink Project. “You add garum. It’s spicy, it's pungent. But it's protein-rich.”

The garum produced in Pompeii was notable for its quality. To make it, people would ferment fish — often boop boop, a species of sea bream also known as bogue — in salt and sometimes other spices for as long as three months. As the flesh decomposes, the bones sink, leaving a liquid, the garum, on top.

“When [vats of garum] were excavated, you could still smell the aroma,” says Lowe, who analyzed the chemical composition of the sauce with a colleague in 2009 and discovered its similarity to umami. “I have a sample of it …. And every time I open it, it stinks the room out because the pungent aroma of this salted anchovy is so awful.”

Garum Production

model of a garum factory

Amanda Borschel-Dan wrote in the Times of Israel: The production of the malodorous sauce must have been a stomach-roiling business. In later periods, due to its powerful reek, laws were legislated that the prized fermented fish “ketchup” must be produced outside of urban centers. To accomplish its pungent putrefaction, the craftsman would place whole small fish such as sardines or anchovies, or chopped up larger fish such as tuna or mackerel, at the base of a jar and pour on top of it spices and salt, followed by another fish layer, etc. According to Erickson-Gini, the recipe’s ratio called for five parts fish to one part salt. [Source: Amanda Borschel-Dan, Times of Israel, December 16, 2019]

A lively video, “Garum, Rome’s Favorite Condiment (Ancient Cooking),” on the Invicta History YouTube channel, said the concoction inside a closed jar would bake in the hot Mediterranean sun for a week as the fish deteriorated, but was saved from rot by the salt. It was then opened and stirred for another 20 days or more (Erickson-Gini suggested up to three months). The resultant “puree of fish goop” was strained through a basket, and the strained liquid is the garum. Other, more solid leftovers could be made into a different sauce or lesser-regarded fish paste called allec.

Archaeological Evidence of Garum

Taras Grescoe wrote in Smithsonian magazine: While archaeologists have excavated concrete vats used for making garum from Tunisia to France, intact organic remains have proven harder to come by. A breakthrough occurred in 2009, when Italian researchers discovered six sealed dolia (large clay storage vessels) in a building that modern scholars have dubbed the Garum Shop at Pompeii. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 buried the building under several feet of ash, perfectly preserving a small factory just as it was salting down a late-summer catch of locally fished picarel to make liquamen. [Source: Taras Grescoe, Smithsonian magazine, November 2021]

Food technicians from the universities of Cádiz and Seville have analyzed the charred, powdered remains from Pompeii. Using that information, and guided by a liquamen recipe thought to have been written in the third century A.D. — it calls for heavily salted small fish to be fermented with dill, coriander, fennel and other dried herbs in a closed vessel for one week — the researchers produced what they claim is the first scientific recreation of the 2,000-year-old fish sauce.

At his laboratory at the University of Cádiz, Víctor Palacios, a chemical engineer, recently showed me a petri dish filled with gritty, grayish-brown powder — a sample of the charred paste of fish bones recovered from the Garum Shop at Pompeii. Using a gas chromatograph and a scanning electron microscope, researchers at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria identified the fish as anchovies. Specialists at the University of Alcalá de Henares performed pollen analysis, which indicated the presence of mint, sage, thyme, oregano and other herbs. Most ancient recipes call for whole small fatty fish to be layered between herbs and salt in concrete vats. Palacios’ team used large glass fermenting vessels.

When small fish start to decay, the bacterial flora in their guts burst through cell walls, initiating the process of autolysis. The fish essentially digest themselves, liquefying the proteins in muscle tissue. The presence of salt slows this fermentation process, promoting lactic acid bacteria that defeat pathogens and such foul-smelling toxins as cadaverine and putrescine. (Too much salt stops autolysis altogether; too little invites botulism.) Palacios’ team found that the result, after 25 days, was a paste of dissolved fish bones and flesh topped by a salty, amber-hued liquid, which smelled like a “mixture of dried fish, seaweed and spices.” The sauce proved to be a protein bomb, especially rich in glutamic acid, the same amino acid that gives Parmesan cheese, tamari sauce and cooked mushrooms their savory, umami intensity.

Re-Creating Garum

Sally Grainger, a British chef and an experimental archeologist, has attempted to recreate Roman-style fish sauce. Peter Smith wrote in Smithsonian magazine: Using various studies “and a recipe from Geoponica, a 10th century collection of agricultural lore, as a guide, Grainger added salted sardines (Pilchardus sardines) and sprats (Sprattus sprattus) to barrels, put the barrels in a greenhouse, and covered the tops with cardboard. Then she waited two months. What’s surprising, Grainger found, was that the recreated ancient fish sauce appeared to be a lot less salty than its modern Southeast Asian counterparts, with just as much protein. Salt slows down the enzymatic process, so industrial-scale fish sauces today—what you might otherwise think of cheaply made “fast” food—actually take longer to make than the ancient brews. In other words, this old, “slow food” fermented faster.” [Source: Peter Smith, Smithsonian magazine, March 1,2012]

Recreating garum is difficult. Taras Grescoe wrote in Smithsonian magazine: Many recipes that survive from antiquity call for allowing fish to putrefy in open vats under the Mediterranean sun for up to three months. Complicating matters, the term could refer to both a sauce used in the cooking process — sometimes also called liquamen — and to a condiment, made with the blood and viscera of fish, that writers such as Petronius, Ausonius and Seneca knew as garum sociorum (“garum of the allies”). In either case, for most scholars, the lesson of garum has been that the past inhabited by Roman gourmands — known to eat sow udders, ostrich brains and roasted dormice rolled in honey — was an unimaginably foreign country. [Source: Taras Grescoe, Smithsonian magazine, November 2021]

Some food historians say it’s impossible to recreate definitive modern versions of these Roman ancient fish sauces. Not only did the Romans consume at least two distinct kinds of garum, but factories in North Africa, Brittany, Spain and other parts of the empire would have used different species of fish — and followed different recipes.

Still, Grainger offers accessible options for those eager to get an idea of what ancient Roman fish sauces tasted like. She singles out Red Boat, a brand of Vietnamese nuoc mam nhi made with black anchovies and salt, and no sweeteners, as the closest thing on the market to liquamen; it is widely available in various grocery stores. Grainger also believes she has located a modern analogue to garum sociorum. For at least 300 years, a similar sauce, ishiri, has been made in Japan’s Ishikawa Prefecture from the fermented blood and viscera of squid. Opaque and rich in proteins, ishiri has the same metallic taste she detected in her experiments with mackerel. Like garum sociorum, it is meant to be used as a condiment, rather than in the cooking process.

Garum Factory Found in Israel

In December 2019, archaeologists announced that they had unearthed a small A.D. 1st century garum factory near the southern coastal Israeli city of Ashkelon. It is one of the only identified industrial-level sites for production of the odorous sauce that has been found in the Eastern Mediterranean. “We have something really unusual here,” Israel Antiquities Authority archaeologist Dr. Tali Erickson-Gini told The Times of Israel.[Source: Amanda Borschel-Dan, Times of Israel, December 16, 2019]

Amanda Borschel-Dan wrote in the Times of Israel: At the 2,000-year-old site, located two kilometers (a mile and a quarter) northwest of the city of Ashkelon, Erickson-Gini’s team uncovered several installations that, when taken together, left the archaeologist with little doubt that she was looking at a rare Holy Land garum production center, or cetaria, she said. Though there are few examples in the eastern Mediterranean, she said that in the Iberian Peninsula, specifically Malaga, there are several installations that mirror what she has uncovered in Ashkelon.

In addition to evidence of fish pools, the team uncovered giant plastered vats, jars used for storing liquid, and what appears to be a large receptacle to hold the strained goopy substance. While fish pools have been found elsewhere in the region, there is only one other identified location in Israel that may possibly have produced the garum, at Dor, said Erickson-Gini. According to what has so far been excavated, the Ashkelon site was not a major factory, and was possibly largely for local use.

The paucity of production sites had always surprised and puzzled the archaeologist, she said. Throughout the Empire, the sauce graced the tables of the Roman world’s rich and famous, as well as the troughs of commoners. “What interests me is the fact that this product was very, very popular in the Roman and Byzantine period. As popular as it was, you’d expect to find a lot of installations. I’m shocked we haven’t found more of them in excavations,” she said.

According to an IAA press release, the Ashkelon production site was abandoned and industry in the area turned to viticulture. Erickson-Gini said that even during the time of the garum production, there is evidence of wine presses and storage jars located only meters away. Later, circa 5th century in the Byzantine period a thriving monastic community produced wine.

Shipwreck Filled with Garum-Filled Amphorae

In 2015, archaeologists announced that they had discovered a 25-meter-long ancient Roman vessel laden with 3000 jars garum – on the seabed off the coast of Alassio, in the northeastern Liguria region of Italy. “It’s an exceptional find that dates to the first or second century AD,” Dr. Simon Luca Trigona, who led the team, told The Local. “It’s one of just five ‘deep sea’ Roman vessels ever to be found in the Mediterranean and the first one to be found off the coast of Liguria. We know it was carrying a large cargo of garum when it sank.” [Source: AFP, December 11, 2015]

“In spite of the mystery that usually surrounds ancient shipwrecks, it is almost certain that the ship was sailing a route between Italy, Spain and Portugal in order to transport a precious cargo of Roman garum. The clue lies in the shape of the clay jars, as the sauce itself has all since seeped into the sea. “After we filmed the wreck and analyzed an amphora [clay jar] and some fragments that a robotic craft brought back to the surface, we realized the ship was carrying a huge quantity of fish sauce when it sank,” said Trigona. “The amphora are almost all of a certain type, which was used exclusively for garum.”

“In addition to the fish sauce, archaeologists also identified two types of jar which were only manufactured in the area around the river Tiber in Rome. It is thought they were probably being used to transport some of the area’s excellent regional wines to the Iberian peninsular. “It’s a nice find because it means we are almost sure about the route this ship was on,” Trugona said. “She most likely sailed out of Rome along the Tiber and sank a couple of weeks later while making the return journey, weighed down by all that fish sauce.”

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons and “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; “Outlines of Roman History” by William C. Morey, Ph.D., D.C.L. New York, American Book Company (1901) ; “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932); BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history/ ; Project Gutenberg gutenberg.org ; Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Live Science, Discover magazine, Archaeology magazine, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, The New Yorker, Wikipedia, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopedia.com and various other books, websites and publications.

Last updated November 2024