The Story of Garum: Fermented Fish Sauce and Salted Fish in the Ancient World by Sally Grainger (review)

Ancient descriptions of fish sauce and their associated terminology are opaque and often contradictory. To complicate matters, they are not always in alignment with the vast body of archaeological evidence we have for these fish products. This dissonance has led to considerable confusion and debate within the academic community. What we think we know about the production, trade, and consumption of fish products in the Greco-Roman world undergoes a reevaluation each time archaeological methods improve or shift focus. An increase in sampling for fish bones at processing sites, for example, has shed light on the species used to create these goods, while residue analysis has improved our understanding of amphora use. The monograph under review here is the first dedicated to fish sauce since R. I. Curtis’s 1991 Garum and Salsamenta: Production and Commerce in Materia Medica. It brings together both traditional and newly published research to provide a much-needed summary of the topic, making extensive use of literary and archaeological evidence. It also represents the culmination of years of experimental work from a scholar who has always had strong and often controversial opinions on fish sauce. It is therefore the story of garum, but from a particular point of view.

Grainger’s aims are to generate a new model of the fish sauce trade in the Roman Mediterranean and focus on the questions that are at the heart of the long-running dispute surrounding fish sauce. Firstly, should we consider fish sauce in the same way as other amphora-borne commodities, and, secondly, how important were the differences in variety and quality (3, 11)? The latter question forms the central argument of the book, and almost every chapter is dedicated to proving her theories regarding the often-confusing topics of fish sauce terminology and quality. In sum, there are four ancient terms for fish sauce-related products: garos (Greek)/garum (Latin), liquamen, muria, and allec. Traditionally, many scholars have considered garum, liquamen, and often muria to be the same thing; a boneless, liquid fish sauce very similar to today’s Thai fish sauces. Allec is widely believed to have been the paste left in the bottom of the vat; and since it contained bones, it was consumed by the poor. Grainger argues strongly against this “single sauce hypothesis” and instead posits that Greek garos, liquid fish sauce, was originally transliterated into Latin as garum, but only until a new expensive sauce made from fish blood and viscera was created sometime between the end of the first century BC and the first half of the first century AD. At this point, the term liquamen was coined (because both types could not be called garum), and now garos = liquamen, while garum referred to the new blood and viscera sauce (68–69). However, this separation of the two products, and change in naming system went unnoticed by many Roman authors, which, Grainger argues, is the reason for much ancient and modern confusion. The elite “continued to use garum to designate the table sauces they saw before them, which ever type they were, without comprehending that another sauce (liquamen) was being used in the kitchen” (68). By late antiquity, the blood viscera garum had declined in popularity, and once again, garos = garum, with some ancient authors seemingly unaware that this more expensive blood sauce had ever existed (76). Muria is a brine created as a byproduct of salting fish, while allec is the paste made of undis-solved fish flesh and could, but did not always, contain bones (41).

The volume’s introduction is followed by twelve chapters organized into a tripart structure. The first five make use of the literary evidence, while Chapters 7 and 8 focus on modern methods of fish sauce production and Grainger’s own experiments, respectively. The final four chapters are dedicated to...