My comment is kind of unrelated to the content of this, but just wanted to say this is the type of stuff I love seeing on Hackernews. The business and tech stuff I find on the platform is nice, but I find this type of really specific passion work is what keeps me coming back to hackernews.
It's great to see this stuff get bubbled up to the front page. Yesterday this got to the top: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29031488 (55 GiB/s fizzbuzz), which was such a good read, and just so specific and niche.
I guess it's just nice to see people so passionate about things.
sort of reminds me of the post someone made a while back about living in their allotment. the conversations people were having in the comments were so entertaining, even though half of them were about regulations in different places!
> Garum is a fermented fish sauce which was used as a condiment in the cuisines of Phoenicia, ancient Greece, Rome, Carthage and later Byzantium. Liquamen is a similar preparation, and at times they were synonymous. [...] Like the modern fermented soy product soy sauce, fermented garum is a rich source of umami flavoring due to the presence of glutamates.
Author says he made “garum (or more accurately, liquamen)”, but provides no explanation of the distinction, nor did I see one in the comments here or on Twitter.
Apparently garum is made from the blood and viscera alone, whereas liquamen uses the whole fish.
The article the author links at the end of the thread goes into this a bit.
>Sally Grainger, an independent researcher and author of The Story of Garum, published last December, also praises Palacios’ effort. But she believes that what the Cádiz team actually produced was a form of liquamen, and because they combined techniques from different recipes, she doubts whether their claims of authenticity are completely justified.
I don't think you want to know what the current common meaning of the Italian word liquame (which derives from liquamen) has become, better call it "a type of fish sauce used by ancient mediterranean people".
A friend of mine - wine maker - here in Spain, brought his own garum recipe to market a few years ago [1]. He's is having tremendous success selling to restaurants.
The most difficult aspect of making garum is the brutal stink after only a couple of days. If you live in a flat/row house it is pretty much impossible without causing grave offense.
You can get very premium Vietnamese fish sauces (also just anchovies and salt) which are smoked and aged in Bourbon barrels for years... for about 1/3rd the price.
It's quite salty, so basically you can use it pretty much everywhere instead of salt. For example you can use it with seafood, like ravioli with mussels, or with mushrooms. Its smell is heavy but the taste is superb.
I use a good asian fish sauce in beef stews (and chili, or cuban-style picadillo, etc) -- nobody notices any fishy taste, it just bumps up the umami and "beefiness"!
Marmite and Vegemite are also really good for adding some umami-saltiness to tomato sauces and stews without being very noticeable for what they are. (Assuming I can stop myself from spreading it all on toast first...)
The Noma fermentation lab in Copenhagen has been experimenting with garum for the past few years. There is a detailed chapter in Noma Ferments if you are interested in learning about the process.
There's a whole list of possibilities when making garum. I've made 7 different ones made of different kinds of fish.
Loosening the definition of what a garum should be, people have been making garum from a lot of other ingredients such as mushrooms. Koji is usually listed as one of the ingredients, as it contains a lot of enzymes that do the same things as the fish' guts do.
I make mine a lot more simple though, just putting a jar in the heater cupboard. Perfect results every time.
The FDA's advisory on Clostridium botulinum Toxin Formation has a lot to say about it.
C. botulinum can enter the process on raw materials. The spores of C. botulinum are very common. They have been found in the gills and viscera of finfish, crabs, and shellfish. C. botulinum type E is the most common form found in freshwater and marine environments. Types A and B are generally found on land but may also be occasionally found in water. It should be assumed that C. botulinum will be present in any raw fishery product, particularly in the viscera.
Because spores are known to be present in the viscera, any product that will be preserved by salting, drying, pickling, or fermentation should be eviscerated prior to processing (see the “Compliance Policy Guide,” Sec. 540.650). Without evisceration, toxin formation is possible during the process, even with strict control of temperature. Evisceration of fish is the careful and complete removal of all internal organs in the body cavity without puncturing or cutting them, including gonads. If even a portion of the viscera or its contents is left behind, the risk of toxin formation by C. botulinum remains. Uneviscerated small fish, less than 5 inches in length (e.g., anchovies and herring sprats), for which processing eliminates preformed toxin, prevents toxin formation during processing and that reach a water phase salt content of 10% in refrigerated finished products, or a water activity of below 0.85 in shelf-stable finished products, or a pH of 4.6 or less in shelf-stable finished products, are not subject to the evisceration recommendation.
Obviously he isn't eviscerating his fish since the process relies on the fish guts still being in there. But he is using small fish. Since he is starting from frozen, he can probably rely on them not containing preformed toxin.
For shelf stable (non-refrigerated) products they recommend 20% salt (which is what he used, unless the calcualtion for water phase salt is somehow different):
Controlling the amount of salt in the product
to 20% water phase salt (wps) or more, to prevent the growth of C. botulinum types A, B, E, and F and other pathogens that may be present in the product (e.g., shelf-stable salted products).
Obviously, 20% salt is a lot of salt, I think you can't use that much for many other kinds of fermentation (e.g. vegetables), because the product would be inedible. But for a sauce, it's fine (soy sauce is ~15%). I wonder what the pH of his final product is. Fish sauce never struck me as particularly acidic.
PS: Not a food scientist, haven't even done a lot of pickling, don't believe anything I write, read the original sources (twice).
> Obviously, 20% salt is a lot of salt, I think you can't use that much for many other kinds of fermentation (e.g. vegetables), because the product would be inedible.
For vegetables, you have lactofermantation that can make you attain a low pH.
They have a method of cooking fish from Peru, called ceviche, just using lemon juice to lower the ph that does all of the work. Incidentally, I believe sauerkraut needs a bit of lemon juice to maintain a ph that discourages botulinum from inhabiting the cabbage during fermentation. The ceviche method isn't a fermentation process - it can cook fish in the fridge in half a day.
> Incidentally, I believe sauerkraut needs a bit of lemon juice to maintain a ph that discourages botulinum from inhabiting the cabbage during fermentation.
I've made sauerkraut a few times, and you don't need it. You usually add ~1/2% of the cabbage weight in salt, press the cabbage wit the salt so that it release juice, and the juice becomes very acide due to lactofermantation.
I mean, different Asian fish sauces are different quality/taste, and I think I can tell the difference between the terrible ones and the great ones! Quality varies quite a bit.
I suspect this is indeed a very good fish sauce, what with the high-quality fish and fancy salt, and "artisenal" production. There are also very good asian fish sauces!
In Thai fried rice, sure! (By which I mean fried rice from thai restaurants in USA, I have zero idea what they do in Thailand, or China, or if they eat fried rice at all. :) )
Whether it's "usually" part of the recipe or not, if you like it, go for it!
Totally different thing than oyster sauce as I've seen oyster sauce.
I put fish sauce in lots of stuff, if it's good fish sauce it's really an umami boost.
Thai cooking uses it in near everything, including fried rice. And most stir-fried veggies. I've been stewing collard greens in chicken broth and fish sauce: delicious!
My grandfather said his first job (as an apprentice) was measuring the Lea and Perrins factory for new mixing vats.
It looks like they've replaced them again, since that time.
And couldn't they have told the scientist that it's "Worcestershire Sauce" and not "Worcester Sauce"? Worcestershire is the county, Worcester is the largest city in that county.
At least it's pronounced correctly. Worcester/Worcestershire rhyme with Leicester/Leicestershire, and pronunciation of "Leicester" should be familiar to Americans as the personal name "Lester". ("Wuster" hasn't caught on yet.)
-cester as a suffix to a place name is from the Latin castrum, meaning fort – these were Roman settlements.
> And couldn't they have told the scientist that it's "Worcestershire Sauce" and not "Worcester Sauce"?
I've heard plenty of English people pronounce it "Wooster Sauce". I'm pretty sure they're aware of the difference. I think it's just become a standard contraction.
Worcester Sauce is a common way to refer to it. Even and Lea and Perrins used to do so - here's an advert for it from the 1840s, along with some generic references to it from the 1830s.
I assumed many Americans, like myself, would be familiar with the pronunciation of Worcester from Worcester, Massachusetts. I didn’t even grow up anywhere near New England.
It doesn't help that the correct pronunciation of "Worcestershire", something like Wu-sta-sha, looks a lot like "Warchester". One is tempted to wrongly map the syllables Wor->Wu Che->Ste Ster->Sha.
Btw. this is one of the prime examples why I think we should use phonetic transscription not only for different alphabets, but also for languages that use latin characters with very different pronunciation (like Irish or Welsh), or even for odd English words like this one.
We do, it's called IPA and Worcestershire is /ˈwʊstərʃər/.
Using something similar for actual normal writing would be difficult though, it would hide all the etymological linkages between different European languages, and even obscure connections within each language.
"Worcester" violates practically every convention of English spelling and pronunciation. Is there any other word in which "rce" even appears, let alone is silent?
`egrep '^[a-z].*rce' /usr/share/dict/words | grep -v "'s" | wc` gives 157 for me but there's a lot of duplication - probably comes down to about 35 base words from a quick eyeball.
There are plenty of other place names that end in -cester pronounced as -ster: gloucester, leicester, bicester. It's somewhat of a rule itself. wor sounding more like woo is just the local accent I think.
I think what's confusing for Americans who didn't grow up with a lot of towns named that way is that "cester" is pronounced "ster", but "chester" is pronounced fully. Throw in a "shire" at the end of that and it's a mouthful.
"rce" is not a syllable here, so it's not that relevant. It's Wor + cester, and cester is always pronounced ster. So it's actually not very surprising.
It's not really that "ce is silent", it's that cester is pronounced "ster". It's extremely common in languages that long, old roots like that are elided in speak - in French they basically always elide the last syllable!
cester/caster/chester (from castrum, meaning fort/castle) is a very common place name ending in English and the cester variant is almost always pronounced ster. Think Leicester, Gloucester, Worcester.
Leicester (the city, not the square in London named for it) is just south of the town of Loughborough.
Leicestershire in general has more than its fair share of difficult placenames: Ashby de la Zouch, South Croxton, Kirby Bellars, Belvoir, Rotherby vs Rothley, Frisby on the Wreake, Nether Broughton, Kibworth Beauchamp, Glooston* (not sure of this one myself), Wymeswold.
I have to say the biggest challenge I had was hiking in wales in Snowdonia and trying to inquire about town and village names. I ended up writing them down to show because I butchered the names no matter how much I tried.
Welsh is a completely different language, with its own writing system.
dd → th, ff → f, ll → hl (ish), w → oo gets you most of the way to being understood as a tourist, in my experience. (Though I'm British, so I've heard many of the larger Welsh place names pronounced properly since childhood, via TV/radio etc.)
if you go that route, ketchup share a very similar lineage as well, albeit it picked up more transformations along the way, it still carries the name as legacy.
I'm not sure if this was intentional, but if it was, well played.
Anyway it's interesting how many times fish fermentation (seemingly independently) seems to have cropped up in various cultures. A bit strange, since you have to be pretty dang hungry before you even go close to a fermenting fish.
I wonder what made it stop. Just centuries of regional specialization that were quickly wiped out when long distance bulk trade went away when the Roman Empire collapsed?
I found it an excellent read. It concentrates on the origins of the republic, so after about octavian, it gets into less detail.
She has also made a TV series which is roughly the same content, but in slightly less written detail, but substituted with her going to the locations and showing you the artifacts.
The one thing that might put you off is that it doesn't have a coherent overall narrative in the traditional sense. Its not like she is telling you a story about the end of the republic, or trying to make you have new conclusions about roman attitudes to imperialism.
Its also not told chronologically. I think she designed it to make you get a feeling for what a roman would consider being "roman" was about.
If you are already reasonably familiar with roman history, this might annoy, but for someone who's only read horrible histories, and some TV history programs, I found it brilliant.
Fermentation has been the not-so secret weapon of many top restaurants these days. Kimchi, garum, miso, all of these add a huge depth of flavor to dishes. And while you can buy most of these from a store, it's often infinitely better when you make them yourself. My homemade kimchi[1] is so much better than store bought. If only I could get myself to make it more often.
I think this is pretty similar if not identical to how current asian fish sauces are traditionally made (when not mass-produced)?
I am wondering if it tastes better than contemporary asian fish sauces mainly because he used better fish (imported from Portugal whole frozen sardines, oh my!), and did it in a traditional "artisenal" way instead of whatever changes they make for mass production.
This is very interesting though! Now I kind of want to try some, but don't know if I have the guts to make it myself.
Anaximandros upon return to his summer home: “Something smells, Alkmioni must have been right, I left the sardines in that jar last summer. Does not smell halfway bad, let’s take some of this golden juice and try on the bread, gold is a good colour, a godly one. After all, Alkmioni has gone have a bath with her childhood friends and we won’t be eating till later. This tastes amazing.” And the rest is history unlike the preceding.
Three weeks later, Anaximandros upon returning to his summer home after running back to his winter home for the blasted firestick so the family can watch squid at play: “Alkmioni’s gonna love this. I stashed a bladder of goat milk under the quadriga. Smells earthy. Let’s take some of this clotted white pâté and try on the bread. White is a good colour, like the clouds. Oh, this also tastes amazing. Pass the liquamen, would you.” And so forth.
With beer and wine, i can understand how one would like at that a think "hmmm, maybe I can try this." But with garum, i don't think the decision was that easy.
Fermented foods in general go way way back, all sorts of fermented things. Just a great way of preserving food needing nothing but salt. I suspect fermenting fish pre-dates even Roman times and was not invented there.
in 10th grade Latin class, the older class (3rd year) had a potluck and left some of the food, one of the items left was named garum (or explained to me as simply: fish paste).
It smelled awful, but I was dared. A spoonful later and I was using every muscle in my body not to vomit everywhere.
I'm not a fish fan unless it's deep fried properly with a decent batter, and I can't stand Salmon, so maybe I'm not the best to critique it, but I still shiver at the memory.
I believe it was made using the full fish body, over a few weeks fermenting in the sun. Homemade, too iirc. I'm surprised I didn't get severely sick, to be honest or food poisoning...
I got to see fish sauce being made first hand when I went to Phu Quoc in Vietnam years ago. I'd love to try and make it myself with locally caught fish to see how it'd go.
Culinary detectives try to recover the formula for garum - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28998703 - Oct 2021 (16 comments)