Keep garum as a popular condiment in Western cuisine?

[chankljp]

So, as a total foodie, I was reading up on food history sometime ago, and came across the story of garum: The legendary Roman fermented fish sauce that played the same integral role in ancient Roman cuisine as ketchup does in western style fast food, or soy sauce in East Asian cuisine.

However, the popular sauce eventually disappeared from history as a result of the Roman Empire's collapse making it's large scale production no longer possible. With the modern day Worcestershire sauce from the UK, and the Southeast Asian fish sauce being the closest equivalent to the Roman garum in spirit, but even then, they were developed completely separately from the original.

So I was wondering: What would have been the minimal and lease divergent POD needed to keep garum integral part of modern day western (Or at the very least, Italian and/or Greek) cuisine?

 

[Vuru]

Apparently, making it smells worse than Surstromming

 

[chankljp]

Apparently, making it smells worse than Surstromming

Well, from what I understand, so does the process of making the Sriracha hot sauce. But that doesn't seem to have an effect on it's popularity :

http://www.sgvtribune.com/general-n...t-and-a-hefty-bill-from-the-city-of-irwindale

 

[Mike Stearns]

IIRC, the problem with making garum is that the recipe specifically calls for a lead pot. That's not exactly good for your health.

 

[Salvador79]

@chankljp Love the challenge!
@Vuru I imagine garum was more like Thai fish sauce and less like Surströmming because it was poured over, well, almost everything.

Garum was produced, to a large extent, in Baetica. What killed garum economics was not just the decline in overland trade, but primarily the de-urbanisation. Garum had had its place with the street food vendors, very much like Thai fish sauce is what you smell when you walk along a street in Bangkok where food is cooked on the sidewalk. With shrinking city populations and a return to rural subsistence on a large scale, the whole concept of fast food disappeared from European history for more than a century.

Keeping an unbroken tradition of garum might be, thus, equivalent to keeping antiquity`s fast food culture around. That might be impossible without greater divergences.

Other than that, you could transform it into a high-quality luxury good instead. That could have happened IOTL, too, with shrinking but not overnight disappearing garum production facilities and its chains of suppliers (fishermen), and who knows if some sort of post-garum fish sauce wasn`t still around in the 16th century, before Spanish cuisine was completely alterated by new world arrivals?

 

[Arkenfolm]

If North Africa remains Christian, could garum survive there? The production was certainly known and undertaken there, and I bet that it could survive in at least regional cuisine, if not becoming part of the national cuisine of whatever nations arise in coastal North Africa.

 

[chankljp]

IIRC, the problem with making garum is that the recipe specifically calls for a lead pot. That's not exactly good for your health.

Well, I am sure that in the modern version of garum, the lead pot can be replaced with something else, the same way that cola doesn't contain coca leaf extract anymore.

@chankljp Love the challenge!

Garum was produced, to a large extent, in Baetica. What killed garum economics was not just the decline in overland trade, but primarily the de-urbanisation. Garum had had its place with the street food vendors, very much like Thai fish sauce is what you smell when you walk along a street in Bangkok where food is cooked on the sidewalk. With shrinking city populations and a return to rural subsistence on a large scale, the whole concept of fast food disappeared from European history for more than a century.

Keeping an unbroken tradition of garum might be, thus, equivalent to keeping antiquity`s fast food culture around. That might be impossible without greater divergences.

Other than that, you could transform it into a high-quality luxury good instead. That could have happened IOTL, too, with shrinking but not overnight disappearing garum production facilities and its chains of suppliers (fishermen), and who knows if some sort of post-garum fish sauce wasn`t still around in the 16th century, before Spanish cuisine was completely alterated by new world arrivals?

Thanks! Glad that someone else is also interested in food history! And how that I read your post, it really makes one realize how fragile the economy and supply network needed to produce something as seemingly simply as fish sauce can be. Can you imagine if (Or when) our modern society collapses, future historians trying to recreate the mysterious condiment known as 'ketchup' or 'tabasco sauce' that people used to put on everything?

I do really like the idea of garum surviving by being made into a luxury good. I did read that the sauce greatly vary in price, ranging from a good bottle that can cost something like $500 of today, to being so cheap that it is given to slaves as part of their rations.

If North Africa remains Christian, could garum survive there? The production was certainly known and undertaken there, and I bet that it could survive in at least regional cuisine, if not becoming part of the national cuisine of whatever nations arise in coastal North Africa.

That is certainly interesting idea. I read on wikipedia that garum first survived the fall of the Westrern Roman Empire, and was still produced in Byzantium. Perhaps it could have somehow spread to the rest of Europe, the Middle East, or even Asia from there?

 

[Beausoleil]

No Islam. Keeps the trade from the East open, which sustained cities on the Rhone and throughout southern Gaul. The maintenance of a pan-Mediterranean trade would probably do it, I think.

 

[Arkenfolm]

I do really like the idea of garum surviving by being made into a luxury good. I did read that the sauce greatly vary in price, ranging from a good bottle that can cost something like $500 of today, to being so cheap that it is given to slaves as part of their rations.

That is certainly interesting idea. I read on wikipedia that garum first survived the fall of the Westrern Roman Empire, and was still produced in Byzantium. Perhaps it could have somehow spread to the rest of Europe, the Middle East, or even Asia from there?

Well, yeah, that's just like wine. But is that really the solution? To my knowledge, in Southeast Asia where fish sauce is common, there isn't quite something like wine (which as we know ranges from bum wine to $500 bottles) in the price differentials.

It's been a while since I was reading up on North Africa, but I believe that into the Byzantine period North Africa cities were producing garum (by the pots used to produce it). Definitely into Late Antiquity. It would obviously evolve into its own thing within a few centuries, much like the modern European fish sauces, but could keep more of the traditional flavor of garum. It's kinda like how the wines of Antiquity are different than the wines we can now drink because of the evolution of production.

I don't know if it would really spread beyond North Africa (could end up a distinctive part of local cuisine yet nothing but), but who knows what people might gain a taste for.

No Islam. Keeps the trade from the East open, which sustained cities on the Rhone and throughout southern Gaul. The maintenance of a pan-Mediterranean trade would probably do it, I think.

Pan-Mediterranean definitely helps, since the southern Mediterranean isn't severed from the northern Mediterranean.