Worchestershire Sauce 2000 Years Ago?

At a Roman banquet guests asked the waiter for a little garum. No fear of insulting the host. He was proud to have the best condiments money could buy.
Some loved their garum (also called liquamen)—fish sauce—and poured it on everything from meat to vegetables. Some even used it a third time on their dessert.

It must have been good. How did they make it?

Here is the recipe according to Gargilius Martialis, a third-century writer:

“Take fatty fish (salmon or sardines or eels), dried aromatic herbs, and salt. Lay down a layer of those strong-smelling herbs at the bottom of a big tub or barrel. Which herbs? Wild fennel, coriander, cultivated fennel, celery, savory, sage, rue, wild spearmint, levístico (?), thyme, marjoram, hedge-nettle, poppies. [In Europe these are common wild herbs.]
On top of that herb layer lay your fish—whole if they are small; in pieces, if big. Now cover the fish with a layer of salt two fingers thick.
Fill the barrel up to the top alternating these three layers: the herbs, the fish, and the salt. Cover the barrel and let it sit for seven days.
Then for twenty days stir the mix from time to time. Then pour off the liquid at the bottom of the barrel and strain it.” That’s your garum.
The first liquid collected was called gari flos—virgin garum—and it was the most prized. Liquid collected on later days was considered of lower quality and priced accordingly.

And the solid remains of those fish in the barrel—did they throw those away?

No: they made allec from them. Allec was a poor man’s food. Cato, the great Roman, used to feed allec to his slaves when he ran out of olives.
Something like allec was what two hundred years earlier Pliny the Elder had called garum. And to him it wasn’t the putrefied mush of fish but of their entrails. The contents or the quality of the sauce changed over time. After all, garum was around for nearly a thousand years. The Greeks invented it, but it was the Romans who really ate it up.

As long as Rome lasted men sprinkled garum on their food. It was the decisive element in all great Roman cuisine. It was used as an ingredient of many dishes, in most sauces, and to give taste to fried foods, soufflès, boiled meat. There was garum wine and garum vinagre. Water garum was army feed during the first century. Garum cured too. Dioscorides says you couldn’t beat it to heal sores of all kinds.

Hispania was the biggest exporter. There were factories all along the east and south coasts of the Peninsula. Because of the booming garum industry towns grew up, some of them big, like Baela Claudia (Bolonia), near Cadiz.

Here is a map showing the old salted fish and garum factories along the Spanish and North-African coast:

From Garum et industries antiques de salaison dans la Mediterranèe Occidentale, by Ponsich and M. Tarradell, Paris, 1965

Garum disappeared mysteriously with the Empire. Today there are a few restaurants near Cadiz that sell their version of it for you to try. The brave put it in their mouth. The heroes swallow it.

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