A Brief History of Fish Sauce
legalnomads.com
legalnomads.com
One of my coworkers was married to a Laotian woman and as such married into a large Laotian community. One day we went to the Asian supermarket and we bought all the stuff to make green papaya salad and larb. He brought three specific things from home for this: a weird aluminum cauldron, a bamboo basket to put on it (to make sticky rice) and a repurposed instant coffee bottle full of the strangest looking sludge. It looked kind of like peering into a chewing tobacco spit bottle. This was a bottle of homemade padaek[1] and he said it was like liquid gold in the community he lived in. It was foul as hell to smell but we did a taste test of the papaya salad before and after mixing it in and sure enough it was so much better with the padaek. It was an eye opening experience and since then I've always had a fish sauce bottle in my fridge. I even use a little of it in things like spaghetti sauce.
Anyway if you have a chance to get your hands on a little homemade padaek, definitely do it. Would kill for some, myself. Also, share new foods with friends if they are open to it. I am very fond of that memory. I had never been exposed to those dishes before and even that small experience broadened my world in a simple, but meaningful way.
Lived in a house for a while with neighbors making it - slow fermenting pots of fish. Not a pleasant olfactory experience.
And don't let them smell the raw shrimp paste.
The Cambodian version is Prahok and apparently it's usually raw and you aren't supposed to eat it raw, but I ate it raw (it was pink colored) for a couple days before someone told me. Prahok sounds gross but the stinky flavor is really reminiscent of cheese.
It's pretty simple to make.
this seems to be a trope. Mark Kurlansky (who is cited later in this fantastic article!) wrote an excellent book called “Cheesecake” whose central plot line concerns a bakery trying to make Cato’s cheesecake, an ancient Roman cheesecake recipe that is often recognized as the “first” cheesecake for whom a recipe was published. Except the bakery/restaurant is Greek, and the owners, who are also Greeks, are convinced that the Romans stole this recipe from them.
As for the liquid gold itself: fish sauce is unbelievable. Elevates dishes as much as its smell nauseates. I was shocked to learn that fish sauce is legitimate just fish and salt!
Weeks later, the rotted fish stench just wouldn't fade from my book of Beethoven sonatas. I ended up throwing it away.
One thing I am “stealing” from SEA is fish sauce in scrambled eggs. Feels almost like a cheat code.
A bit of stone ground mustard added to scrambled eggs is another culinary delight.
It depends on your risk tolerance to try I suppose. It will either be a delicious variant or create a space-time singularity dooming us all...
:-D
It is clearly an issue of sensitivity.
You don’t use much when you use it but I somehow go through a bottle every couple years.
I love anchovies and use a lot of them in many of the dishes I cook (including tomato sauce). Fish sauce ruins everything it touches for me. It isn’t lack of exposure either; I lived on Vietnamese home-cooking for many years. I eat a lot of weird and pungent things but I have no context for why anyone would want to put that fish sauce in their food. Also, some types of fish sauce from around the world don’t have this effect for whatever reason.
I’m pretty sure from observation that it is gene-linked thing, like the cilantro sensitivity. While rare, even some Vietnamese people seem to fall into this set and it is part of their cuisine.
Also, why not reflect on the nature of fish sauce and the nature of tomato sauce? Does that give you any ideas about what ratio might be edible? Any constraints at all on what might be worth trying?
The fact that you have to focus on moving the conversation away from the the point and are trying to move the conversation towards incorrect assumptions and "the nature of tomato sauce" is telling.
I imagine it is like the people who are sensitive to cilantro, thinking it tastes like soap.
I make mapo tofu with 1 tsp each of fish sauce, oyster sauce and light soy sauce. I don't think anyone would think it tastes like fish or oyster sauce in any way, but it doesn't taste right at all without them. The same goes for many other dishes.
What kind of fish sauce do you use?
One of my kids is pretty picky, even sensitive to onions, but doesn't seem to pick up on the anchovies. She'll eat fish, though, depending on mood, so maybe she's not the best benchmark.
"This was cooked with fish sauce" -> "This tastes fishy"
The anchovies disappear into the food. For people like me, the fish sauce never does, you just get a mouthful of rancid fish taste. People gave up trying to hide it from me years ago because nothing really seems to work.
Swooping in to say; Squid brand fish sauce[0] for the win!
0 - https://importfood.com/products/thai-sauces-condiments/item/...
Chop 2-3 pieces of garlic and roughly the same amount of chilli into very fine pieces (same cutting board so they mix already while chopping) and add it. Then squeeze about a slice of lime. taste and up/down sugar/acidity/fishiness to taste.
Edit: Typically I use 3 tablespoons of nước mắm with 12 of water for the 4:1 (forgot that in the initial post, otherwise the sugar amounts and so forth make little sense).
Fish sauce is added to soups, to dishes during cooking as well as at the end. Dressing a papaya salad with a fish sauce heavy dressing is only one way of using it, we use it to make dipping sauces.
We also use Anchovy paste as an ingredient in other dipping sauces, and dressings for salads. And we add it to meat dishes much as worcestershire sauce is: given its an ingredient along with Tamarind, it's much the same thing.
In Britain, it's a posh paste to spread on toast, much as we use Vegemite or Marmite. Anchovy toast was an afternoon tea thing.
I think, it's pretty sauce like. If not, I think it's a fundamental ingredient of sauces people reach over to use directly.
I also buy from Italians at a farmers market here in Switzerland rotten anchovies packed in salt and ground peppercorns. Stinks but when you add one to pasta sauce you're making the smell disappears and tons of glutamates are added.
Does this condiment have a specific name?
this seems to be a trope. Mark Kurlansky (who is cited later in this fantastic article!) wrote an excellent book called “Cheesecake” whose central plot line concerns a bakery trying to make Cato’s cheesecake, a cheesecake often recognized as the “first” cheesecake for whom a recipe was published. Except the bakery/restaurant is Greek, and the owners, who are also Greeks, are convinced that the Romans stole this recipe from them.
As for the liquid gold itself: fish sauce is unbelievable. Elevates dishes as much as its smell nauseates. I was shocked to learn that fish sauce is legitimate just fish and salt!
Cato's cheesecake is named in Latin "placenta", which comes from a Greek word whose approximate meaning is "flat cake".
It was called "flat" because it was made from stacked flat sheets of baked dough, between which a filling was put. In the recipe of Cato, the main ingredients mixed in the filling were cheese and honey.
The name "placenta", with various phonetic alterations, continues to be used until today in some European languages, for this kind of cake.
Nevertheless, a Greek name does not necessarily mean that this kind of cake came from Ancient Greece. Before the Romans conquered all Italy, there were many Greeks in Southern Italy and especially in Sicily. After the Romans also conquered the Greek peninsula, there were a lot of Greeks in Rome, including many slave Greek cooks.
So the name of the cake could have its origin in some Greek cook from Italy or Rome.
Worcestershire sauce is a descendent of garum.
I highly recommend avoiding going anywhere near them.
I'm told if you want a sense of it, add knobs of soft blue cheese to your cuscous.
You also don't need much equipment: scales and an immersion circulator should do the trick.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/R1Hq3WEqVeI
The video claims the smell is not "entirely unpleasant" but that's a lie. It is the most disgusting smell I have ever encountered. And I used to have to shovel manure and clean chicken coops growing up. Once I even had to dig a dead racoon out of the guts of a square baler after it got run over and jammed up the machinery and then sat for a few days in the summer heat. Garum smells worse.