Garum, Roman fish sauce

A Roman herb sauce called for fresh mint, rue, coriander, and fennel, with lovage, pepper, honey, and fish sauce. It is one of the Roman recipes in the library, from the cookbook called Apicius. Fish sauce appears in most of the recipes in the whole cookbook, in dishes of peas, pears, eggs, and even roses.

Romans had several names for fish sauces, among them garum, liquamen, muria, and allec. Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century CE, said garum was made from fish guts and other parts that would be thrown away, soaked in salt until they rotted. The thick dregs left behind were allec. Surviving recipes give two methods. In one, fish and salt were layered in open vats and left in the sun for up to three months. In the other, they were cooked in brine until the mixture had boiled down. The historian Benedict Lowe says the salt had to make up at least a fifth of the mix to stop the fish from going bad.

Large fish-salting works stood along the coasts of the western Mediterranean and the Atlantic. At Baelo Claudia, in southern Spain, archaeologists have found twelve workshops, and at Troia, in Portugal, twenty-five. Pliny named the best garum as that made from mackerel at Carthago Spartaria, in Spain. He said two congii of it, a liquid measure, cost almost a thousand sesterces. According to Lowe, the Pompeii fish-sauce dealer Aulus Umbricius Scaurus put his name on his jars. A DNA study published in 2025 found that a Roman fish-sauce vat at Adro Vello, in Galicia in northwest Spain, held sardines.

Fish sauce was not only for the rich. According to Lowe, the jars and fish bones found at Pompeii and Herculaneum give no sign that it varied by wealth or rank. The emperor Diocletian's price list of 301 CE set prices for two grades. The philosopher Seneca called it the costly ooze of bad fish and said its salty rot burned the stomach. The writer Taras Grescoe reports that in 2009 Italian researchers found sealed jars in a Pompeii fish-sauce shop, and that food scientists from the universities of Cádiz and Seville later made a sauce based on their remains. The food historian Sally Grainger, he writes, thinks this sauce is closer to liquamen than to garum, and doubts the claims made for its authenticity. Pliny already knew several kinds, made from different fish in different places.