Garum = Roman era fish sauce

Have I blogged on this yet? I think I mentioned it.

One thing I most remember about the talks we got at the archaeological dig at Hippos/Sussita was on amphora and one thing transported in them: Garum

Marketing has been around a long time. What, producers asked themselves, to do with left over fish? How can one transport fish over long distances and therefore increase our clientele? Fish cannot be kept fresh long. Fresh fish tastes best. What to do?

Answer: Boil down stinky leftover fish, transport it in jars, and call it "Garum" and sell it as a wonderful delicacy. Lots of foods are like that. Examples: Throw in all the spoiled meat, maybe some beans, add a lot of hot peppers and call it "chili". Slumgullion must have a similar beginning. I think of "chicken wings" that way today. You take the worst part of the chicken, a part that was often thrown away or made into dog food. When my mom cooked the whole chicken in the poorer days of my youth, my dad would graciously eat the wings, leaving for us children the better parts, the thigh, breast, and leg. I'm not sure who ate the backs. But some enterprising food merchant created sauces and brazenly touted "Chicken Wings" as a delicacy. Well, it is if you believe it. Some rich people will eat most anything if it costs a lot and has a fancy name, see caviar (fish eggs).

Anyway GARUM is an early marketing ploy brilliantly conceived and readily accepted by rich and poor alike in Roman culture for many centuries. There was a rich version using real fish, costing like caviar and a poorer sauce using mostly water and fish heads and such sold for poor people to flavor their food. But essentially it is rotten fish boiled in water. There is no other way to see it. In order to travel long distances by boat it can be no other way. It cannot be fresh. Marketers are great at simply renaming things. They touted this as an advantage, not as rotten but as a delicacy. People bought it for many generations. I say it was brilliant.

Garum, fish sauce, was shipped throughout the Mediterranean area in the bottoms of ships in strange looking pots called amphora (amphorae). These pots had double handles for easy moving, narrow mouths to be easily stoppered, and pointed bottoms to stack more easily. In ship bottoms they would double as ballast, keeping the boat upright in heavy weather.

These strange looking jars were actually very practical. They too were used for centuries. I think they evolved because of the Mediterranean Sea's longish narrow shape, a great natural canal used for trading and shipping goods by sea. Most people lived by the sea in Roman and Greek times. The longest portion of a trading travel would be by ship and not by land. So trading vessels were adapted to boats more than to land transportation methods.