Time: 12 mins. Length of main text: 1500 words
transcript: Garum and the Roman World: the fish sauce that helped to build an Empire
Nearly two thousand years ago, in the northern frontier of Roman Britain and the Roman Empire itself, an army unit was stationed close to Hadrian’s Wall at Vindolanda fort. The wind and rains were fierce and the winters long and cold, and the soldiers gladly took possession, along with their new socks from home, of some huge pottery jars of fish sauce.
These Roman legionaries were stationed at a frontier network that operated as a defence, a customs barrier, and a visual statement to the power of Rome. They spent their time putting in the hard graft to adapt to ever-changing imperial whims, building and re-building, drilling and training, scouting and marching, skirmishing and sleeping, playing board games and writing letters home. The small wins for the soldiers included their food, especially rations from home. A sauce or ketchup to add to their vegetables, bread and porridge would have been very welcome.
You might think, hang on – fish sauce? Among all the essentials that the Roman army decided that its legionaries needed, like military equipment and clothes and salt and bread, they decided on a fishy ketchup? Why? Why was it transported across land and sea, and huge distances, to these soldiers - and why does this matter?
And why am saying that fish sauce helped to build an Empire? Let me go into the story a little further.
About Garum
A comparable taste to Roman fish sauce, also known as garum or liquamen, is a classic Worcestershire sauce made with real anchovies.
Garum has an umami flavour, and food historians like Sally Grainger have contributed greatly to our knowledge about its appetising uses, researching and experimenting with the known regional and local variations in recipes, including using sardines, vinegar and spices.
Garum was important in a Roman world where there were no sun-dried umami tomatoes or bottled passata sauces.
Without the tomatoes that underpin so much of today’s mediterranean cookery, diet and food production, all Roman condiments were highly valued, especially garum that had a decent shelf-life and could be transported across and to the far-flung provinces.
Roman-era cooking included a form of pizza, a flattish bread that could be served with vegetables and flavoured with various additions like garum, olives, olive oil, salt, honey, fruit, nuts, herbs, and spices.
The trade in garum and the large pottery jars in which it was transported, called amphorae, gives us a window onto the past: it doesn’t just let us see the type of economic activity we are dealing with in the Roman world, but it also really shines a light on the labours of workers in fisheries and production workshops – and that includes the work of women and children as well men, both enslaved and free.
The spread of amphorae containing olive oil, olives, wine and garum, that regularly are found on archaeological sites throughout the Roman world, reveal the vastness of the Roman cultural sphere of influence, even among the non-elite classes.
We can also observe the cultural politics and manners of seafood encapsulated in mosaics and wall-paintings, from the Mediterranean to Britain.
Making Garum
How was garum made; and what can this information tell us about the Roman economy? Fortunately, we have some ancient historical sources to help us through the process of understanding.
A useful book known as the Geoponika that describes making garum wasn’t fully assembled till the 10th century AD, but it’s nevertheless illuminating because it’s based largely on a much earlier work. This work, by Vindonius Anatolius, an agricultural writer from the area that is now in modern Lebanon, dates to the later Roman period.
The Geoponika tells us that, and I’m quoting here from the translation of Professor Jo-Ann Shelton:
‘The entrails of fish are placed in a vat and salted. Also used are whole small fish, especially smelts, or tiny mullets, or small sprats, or anchovies, or whatever small fish are available. Salt the whole mixture and place it in the sun. After it has aged in the heat, the garum is extracted in the following manner. A long, thickly woven basket is placed into the vat full of the ... fish. The garum enters the basket, and the so-called liquamen is thus strained through the basket and retrieved.’ End of quote.
The remaining fishy sediment was called allec, and, in the amazing sensory kaleidoscope of the workshops, kitchens and households of the Roman world, this allec was kept; and often used as a fish paste.
Was garum expensive to buy for the common man and woman? Going by price lists that survive from the Roman world, not especially. By volume it was cheaper than decent wine, and the Roman soldiery often had a diluted version to make it go further – and a very diluted version of it could be drunk as a beverage.
Garum and the Roman economy
Sizeable profits were made by the owners of the big workshops through scale of production alone, riding on the back of existing trade routes & transport networks, and the opening up and rapid expansion of new markets. And so, as even non-luxury goods like garum became worth trading long distances, the Roman economy continued to grow. The quid pro quo from the provinces was the Roman state’s ruthless exploitation of their natural resources .... and their people, up to and including human trafficking and slavery.
As we’ve seen, garum was transported all the way to northerly outposts like Vindolanda near Hadrian’s Wall. Why did the Roman state make such an effort over land, sea, and rivers for a such a condiment? What was it about garum that made it so valuable to those soldiers?
Well, I think the answer’s a bit Proustian, really; as in, the madeleine cake story from the novel In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. Proust as an adult remembered with a jolt of emotion-filled reminiscence the taste of the little madeleine cake he knew from childhood, taken with a sip of tea.
There is a psychology of redolence around the tastes and smells of food we eat as children, and which maintain a hold over us in adulthood. Memory of taste has the capacity to transport us to the lost worlds of our pasts with that very first bite or sip, temporarily wiping away the dull and mortal mediocrity of the present. Maybe, as for Proust, the second and third tastes aren’t quite as powerful, but that first one really delivers in all sorts of sensory ways.
For the Roman soldiers stationed in what must have seemed like the arse-ends of nowhere, garum was a taste reminder of their home in Gaul and the Mediterranean lands. Trapped in the rain-lashed, wind-whipped forts of northern Britain, Roman soldiers consumed the sauce whose unique taste, whose absolute singularity, could conjure for them a whole other world of sunshine, blue sea and olive groves that they had left behind and hoped one day to see again.
Something as lowly as fish sauce was a morale-booster, a creator of childhood worlds, for all those building the Empire in the provinces: for the army, the officers’ dependants and slaves, the civilian administrators, the colonists, and the traders.
And, through cultural colonisation, garum was introduced to the provincials, first the native tribal elites and then the farming classes and the new town-dwellers. The childhood taste of Rome and the Mediterranean world, within just a couple of generations, became the colonial taste of aspiration.
The vast scale of the production of garum in the Mediterranean lands that lie in modern Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, in what were huge workshops that might reasonably be called small factories, goes to heart of the one of great debates in Roman academia. Was the Roman economy a market, capitalist-type economy; or a more primitive one, inherently avaricious and brutal, over-dependant on slavery and inequalities, and with unstable systems of governance and currency that inevitably crashed, taking down with them trade routes and the means of production? Or was it all a bit of a complex, fluid mixture?
What we do seem to know is that the Roman economy at its height, in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, when the Roman Empire reached its greatest extent, indicated by the Empire’s stunning and widespread material culture and frontiers, was remarkable.
Also remarkable was the rapidity of its demise in the west from the late 4th century onwards. When trade routes collapsed, so did the production of Roman garum – and much more besides.
Suffice to say that garum, a humble fishy condiment, helps us to understand and humanise these economic processes, from the lives of fishers and their boats and nets to the free and enslaved workers who processed the fish – all the way through the supply chain across water and land, to far flung borders like Hadrian’s Wall.
How many homesick legionaries, I wonder, ate their meals with the sauce that tasted of the fruits of the sea, and pictured the rich river valleys of Gaul and the bright blue Mediterranean and thought, ‘what in hell are we doing here?’
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Sources, photographs, acknowledgements & attributions, and some further useful images online:
Jo-Ann Shelton’s As the Romans Did: A Sourcebook in Roman Social History (1998 edition, pp 83-84)
Sally Grainger blog posts e.g: https://peoplingthepast.com/2022/02/25/the-story-of-garum-and-other-adventures-in-roman-food-with-sally-grainger/
See also Vindolanda’s website, www.vindolanda.com e.g. https://www.vindolanda.com/blog/food-and-drink-part-2
Photographs of Hadrian’s Wall under snow: courtesy of Gav Cass, via Facebook; and Mike Quinn geograph.org.uk
Photograph of Vindolanda Fort: Bill Cresswell, geograph.org.uk, via Wiki Commons
Photograph from hillside overlooking Vindolanda: Phil Champion, via Wiki Commons
Photograph of garum amphora in Vindolanda Museum: attribution MumblerJamie, via Wiki Commons
Image of Vindolanda Roman fort, The Vindolanda Trust (Facebook Page)
Photograph of Patrícia Brum and of stone tanks at Troía, Portugal: Célia Pedroso article in Culinary Backstreets
Garum factory art: M. Rais, Peinture illustrant l'usine de salaison exposée au musée archéologique de Nabeul, Wiki Commons
Ancient Roman bread: photographed by Fred Cherrygarden, detail of a fresco from Herculaneum showing a loaf of bread, National Archaeological Museum of Naples, Wiki Commons
Madeleine cakes: by MairieSY, Wiki Commons
Garum factory archaeological site, aerial view: Heritage Conservation Outside The City Pikiwiki Israel, Wiki Commons
Roman aqueduct: Aqua Claudia, Lazio by iessi, Wiki Commons
Roman slaves in collars, from Smyrna (Turkey): in Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, uploaded by Dorieo to Wiki Commons
Roman theatre at Sabratha, Libya: uploaded by Houss 2020 to Wiki Commons
Group of five amphorae from garum factory Olisipo, Lisbon: Carole Raddato (Frankfurt), Wiki Commons
Thomas Cole painting 1836, The Course of Empire Desolation is in the public domain