Culinary detectives try to recover the formula for garum | Hacker News Reader

Culinary detectives try to recover the formula for garum

smithsonianmag.com

51 pointssamizdis18 comments

Ongoing related thread:

I made my own garum - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29011872 - Oct 2021 (96 comments)

Link to tweet storm from an archaeologist who created a recipe here: https://twitter.com/lostsupper/status/1453003368725717000

I was astonished that the production of garum was so central to the economy in the Mediterranean, and how it disappeared completely. I had never heard of it until I visited Empúries. I can only imagine how it must have smelled to produce it at an industrial scale.

>disappeared completely

Not really. It evolved into things like Worcestershire, ketchup and a bunch of less known sauces. Colatura di alici is probably closest in spirit to the Roman preparation.

Back in the days, spices were scarce and fish abundant. I guess, if you wanted to eat something that tasted good, Garum was the way.

I like to think that Garum tasted roughly like the modern-day calabrese Sardella. At least in my imagination. For reference:

https://www.italiannotebook.com/food-wine/sardella-calabrian...

Clearly it's garum day on HN.

>> Too much salt stops autolysis altogether; too little invites botulism.

>>Our garum is very salty, very concentrated

Yup. Salt was very expensive in Roman times. (It is linked to "salary" for good reason.) I'd bet money that nobody today would dare sell or even make something anywhere close to the actual ancient product, the cheap low-salt stuff used by normal people. Botulism is not something to toy around with.

Well meat/fish have always been scarce enough to be high cost as well. So using salt to preserve them is a good use of it.

In many poor regions of the world salted fish products are the dominant animal protein.

Plus, this was for making a condiment. You don't lose the salt, it still gets added to your food before you eat it.

Exactly. If salt is scarce, cutting it into a condiment is a great way to stretch it and use it.

There's no indication that low-salt garum was a thing. That would just be horribly spoiled fish juice.

People probably weren't in the habit of consuming things that reliably made them sick or dead.

Side note, I found this channel the other day:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsDUyQI88LLvpu9RCevwQEA

Which I thought was quite entertaining.

May I recommend this other channel I enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/c/TastingHistory

Yes! Speaking of that channel, he did a video on garum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S7Bb0Qg-oE

The article is from the future. Smithsonian is for time travel.

The article states it is November 2021.

It's common for printed magazines to carry dates that are a month or two after the magazine is actually printed, because that was when subscribers would get their copy or it would appear on the news stand. I think this became common so buyers wouldn't think they were getting an old issue.

True, I recall regularly getting Nintendo Power a month "early", which felt great.

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