Posted on 02/07/2020 9:20:48 AM PST by SunkenCiv
A factory to make Roman fish sauce about 2,000 years ago has been found in Ashkelon -- about 2 kilometers (1.25 miles) outside the ancient city.
The location of the vats on the southern city's outskirts shores up the supposition that the fish sauce, called garum, had to be manufactured out of town because the process was an olfactory abomination.
The fish farms that provided the raw material for this ancient industry were no joy to live next to either, it seems.
Being a reeking concoction that begins with drying fish guts and then a fermentation stage, adding spice and serving, it is no wonder its production was kept afar from residential areas...
"This is a rare find in our region and very few installations of this kind have been found in the Eastern Mediterranean," says Tali Erickson-Gini from the Israel Antiquities Authority.
"Ancient sources even refer to the production of Jewish garum," she adds. "The discovery of this kind of installation in Ashkelon evinces that the Roman tastes that spread throughout the empire were not confined to dress but also included dietary habits."
...Garum seems to go back over 2,500 years to ancient Greek and Phoenician cuisine. They shipped it in the same type of clay vessel (an amphora) that they used for wine and olive oil, and one theory posits that the noun itself derived from the Greek word for shrimp -- sounds like garida.
If anything, modern epidemiologists suspect garum of spreading tapeworms hosted in fish throughout the Roman Empire, including to areas where fish were unknown. To be clear, if you eat an uncooked fish contaminated with cysts of Diphyllobothrium latum -- i.e., the fish tapeworm -- you get the worm.
(Excerpt) Read more at haaretz.com ...
When 1st hubby was in the AF, we were friends with a couple-the wife was Japanese-once when she and I were sampling each others’ ethnic foods, I gave her some marinated and grilled rattlesnake and she gave me a container of some brownish gooey stuff-fermented soybean sauce-explaining that it is made by cooking the soybeans in saki, putting in a pottery container and allowing it to ferment (she used the words-”you let it rot”) for 2 weeks. I thanked her-it smelled like sour milk left in the sun-I didn’t eat any, but my husband loved the stuff...
I think that she gave some Natto to you.
And here I thought some British dude invented Worcestershire sauce just a few hundred years ago....
It was sealed and it was ceramic tile... mam nem is insidious. A wiff and you are heaving and retching. A drop in a gallon of chili and you have a winner. That same drop under your nose and you know what bulimia feels like.
The S. E.Asian countries all use a “fragrant” fermented fish sauce that will give garum a run for the money. I used to frequent a restaurant where a group of Asian businessmen met in a private room for lunch. When the Nuoc Cham came out, I saw the rest of the restaurant diners begin to order their checks and leave, those closest to the private area first.
The Quality of Fish Sauce
An article on a Vietnamese website describes the fermentation process in detail: As soon as fishing boats return with their catch, the fish are rinsed and drained, then mixed with sea salttwo to three parts fish to one part salt by weight. They are then pressed into large earthenware jars, lined on the bottom with a layer of salt, and topped with a layer of salt. A woven bamboo mat is placed over the fish and weighed down with heavy rocks to prevent the fish floating when the water inside them is extracted by the salt and fermentation process. The jars are covered and left in the sun for nine months to a year.
The flavor takes time to develop, as the article goes on to explain: From time to time, they are uncovered to expose the mixture to direct, hot sunshine, which helps to digest the fish and turn it into a fluid. Periodic sunning produces a superior fragrant fish sauce with a clear, reddish-brown color. Eventually, the liquid is removed from the jars, preferably through a spigot on the bottom so that it passes through the layers of fish remains. Any sediment is removed and the filtered fish sauce is transferred to clean jars and allowed to air in the sun for a couple of weeks to dissipate the strong fishy odor. It is then ready for bottling. The finished product is 100 percent, top-grade, genuine fish sauce.
I googled it-and yeah, that looks like the stuff, and the description of the smell is pretty accurate, too-I’m a healthy diet freak-and it says Natto is very healthy-but no way I’m eating that, even if it was the secret of eternal youth...
It's tasty, though!
They still have to make it in vats outside the city...
:]
Oh heck yeah!
Who has the cooking thread ping list?
And what about the sewing thread?!? ;^)
Those sewing ping list members really keep this place in stitches.
the feed lots and holding pens outside of Amarillo have a “unique” aroma, shall I say.
Im out here in the mushroom capital of the world, maybe a nice fragrant fish sauce could improve the local olfactory experience.
Thai fish sauce is my soy. Theres a few variants that I never learned the names so I labeled them by smell; feet sauce, @ss sauce .
As a kid, I never considered anything we ate odd, pungent or ethnic for that matter. It was food and youll eat it or itll be waiting for you at breakfast.
I eat a lot of Mexican, some Cuban & PR too and havent found anything that I didnt want seconds. Hispanic foods, if not done with dairy, tend to agree with me. Menudo sounds like pepper pot, Id eat it - bring on the fish sauce!
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