6 ms·
A Brief History of Fish Sauce
- tananan 6mo agoThanks for sharing. It is especially interesting to hear the factors that contributed to the decline of fish sauce use in the west. One thing I am “stealing” from SEA is fish sauce in scrambled eggs. Feels almost like a cheat code.
- vinhnx 6mo agoOh absolutely and you're welcome! Btw, fish sauce in scrambled eggs over rice is one of the simplest, most satisfying meals you'll find across Southeast Asia, in my country Vietnam especially. It's my favorite meal also.
- stevenwoo 6mo agoICYMI - This is an attempt to mimic a secret Vietnamese American restaurant recipe but interesting use of fish sauce with spaghetti https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/san-francisco-style-vietnamese-american-garlic-noodles/ https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/san-francisco-style-viet...
- AdieuToLogic 6mo ago> 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.
- markdown 6mo agoWhat if my mustard is made without stones. Will it still work?
- AdieuToLogic 6mo ago> What if my mustard is made without stones. Will it still work? 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
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- ghaff 6mo agoAt least in the US, fish in general is somewhat polarizing and, probably especially, strong tasting fish like anchovies, fish sauce, etc. Just not something probably the majority of people grew up with.
- rayiner 6mo agoIts midwesterners. There’s a fish tradition in most other parts of the country.
- 121789 6mo agoNah fish sauce is different. You can give most midwesterners fish and chips or worcestershire and they’ll be fine with it. But many will find fish sauce initially pungent and repulsive until they get used to it
- tomjakubowski 6mo agoThis is simply incorrect. Midwesterners have Fish Fries, often on Friday. Lake fishing is a big deal in MN, WI, IL, at least. https://www.culvers.com/what-is-a-fish-fry https://www.culvers.com/what-is-a-fish-fry
- jandrewrogers 6mo agoIt isn’t just familiarity. Some people experience some fish sauces as having vividly foul flavor. This includes people who routinely eat anchovies, cured fish, etc. It is clearly an issue of sensitivity.
- duped 6mo agoWorcestershire sauce is a fish sauce that's used all over American cuisine, especially BBQ.
- jandrewrogers 6mo agoYep. But unlike, say Red Boat, I don’t know anyone who thinks it has a strong rancid taste.
- stackghost 6mo agoPut it in tomato sauce for pasta. Just a tablespoon or so.
- stackghost 6mo agoOkay I know we're not supposed to complain about downvotes but c'mon it's actually delicious, doesn't taste like fish, and just adds umami. Don't knock it until you try it!
- jandrewrogers 6mo agoI didn’t downvote you but fish sauce does taste strongly like rancid fish to some people, even in trace quantities. Nothing about that flavor profile is delicious. There is nothing stealthy about it either if you are one of those people; you can immediately detect that disgusting note on the first bite. 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.
- dfxm12 6mo agoI'm just down voting a meaningless comment. 1T fish sauce + an unknown amount of tomato sauce could taste like anything from fish sauce to tomato sauce.
- dbcooper 6mo agoWorcestershire Sauce (fermented anchovy base) with eggs is a classic combination for a reason.
- kulahan 6mo agolime juice with the fish sauce works surprisingly well (in scrambled eggs, I mean)
- saysjonathan 6mo agoHomemade garum is a fun kitchen experiment, if you have the equipment and patience. Heat + protease + protein substrate is really all you need.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- valzevul 6mo agoOn that note, the easiest way to get your hands on some protease is to buy digestive enzymes sold as food supplements (most often they're made out of dried pork pancreas). You also don't need much equipment: scales and an immersion circulator should do the trick.
- joshu 6mo agoit hasn't updated in a while but i quite like this blog: https://www.culinarycrush.biz/all/will-it-garum https://www.culinarycrush.biz/all/will-it-garum
- dbg31415 6mo agoPlease, for the love of all that is holy, do not make this if you have neighbors. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/R1Hq3WEqVeI 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.
- senderista 6mo agoFish fertilizer is the worst smell I have ever smelled. Similar to how our dogs smell after they've rolled in rotting salmon carcasses on a stream bank.
- solomonb 6mo agoI think all you need is salt, fish, and a clay jar?
- kccqzy 6mo agoI bought a bottle of Vietnamese fish sauce (Red Boat brand, the most recommended brand) and added a teaspoon to some pea leaves. I loved the resulting flavor, but my partner did not and complained that it had too much of a fishy smell. A lot of cooking techniques actually seek to remove this fishy smell even when cooking fish, so it was not welcome to add this to something that didn’t contain fish in the first place. It’s certainly not a flavor everyone would like.
- antinomicus 6mo agoFish sauce is not supposed to be added to the point that you can taste the fishy taste, you do get that right? If you’ve added enough to impart fishy taste, you’ve added way too much.
- morkalork 6mo agoRight? It's there to add a layer of depth and savoury umami
- 121789 6mo agoLots of people are super sensitive to the “fishiness” of fish sauce. I can taste it with just a few drops in a large dish. I love it now, but it took a while to get used to
- kccqzy 6mo agoI could not taste the fishy taste myself but my partner can. It varies by person how sensitive they are.
- xuki 6mo agoSome people are just more sensitive to certain smells and flavors than others, especially if they didn't have previous exposure to them.
- NL807 6mo agoNot quite true. Lots of Thai dishes use a tonne of fish sauce and even shrimp paste in their dishes. They even make side dish dipping sauce (Nam Jim Jaew) that's like basically 50% fish sauce.
- rcakebread 6mo agoI'm just here to thank Kenji for making me try fish sauce.
- dherman 6mo agoMy high school Latin classmates and I made garum and left it to ferment in my back yard for a month. Young and foolish as we were, we stored it in a plastic Tupperware container. The day I brought it back to school for the class tasting, I had it sitting on a stack of piano books in the passenger seat of my car. Weeks later, the rotted fish stench just wouldn't fade from my book of Beethoven sonatas. I ended up throwing it away.
- robocat 6mo agoI vividly remember the reek of a fish sauce factory in Vietnam. I highly recommend avoiding going anywhere near them.
- rawgabbit 6mo agoI can only eat it when used as a dipping sauce for Bánh Xèo https://www.bonappetit.com/story/banh-xeo-vietnamese-sizzling-crepes https://www.bonappetit.com/story/banh-xeo-vietnamese-sizzlin...
- throwaway20148 6mo agoIn the early 2000s, post-dotcom-crash I worked at small consultancy for the airlines industry that had a software wing. I think I made $11/hour slinging PHP code. They had sequestered the engineers, (half a dozen of us, all young) in the back of a large print shop (the consultancy specialized in manuals) and we had our own kitchen back there, so we sometimes cooked together. 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padaek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padaek
- kbutler 6mo agoSounds like what they call "bla ra" in Thailand (Northeastern Thailand has a lot of Laotian influence). Thick/chunky, unlike the more refined "fish sauce" - "nam bla". Lived in a house for a while with neighbors making it - slow fermenting pots of fish. Not a pleasant olfactory experience.
- mikepurvis 6mo agoI put a little fish sauce in chili too; it's great for giving savoury things that nice umami kick.
- semi-extrinsic 6mo agoThis stuff is great for anything savory. Just don't tell your kids what it is. And don't let them smell the raw shrimp paste.
- babybjornborg 6mo agohttps://radiolab.org/podcast/a-little-pompeiian-fish-sauce-goes-a-long-way https://radiolab.org/podcast/a-little-pompeiian-fish-sauce-g...
- tcper 6mo ago[dead]
- skipkey 6mo agoSo the West still does have a fish sauce in common use, although one that's not nearly as strong as the eastern variants. Worcestershire sauce was an attempt to recreate an Indian fish sauce, and to this day contains anchovies.
- klik99 6mo agoKetchup also has origins from fish sauce
- wahnfrieden 6mo agoColatura di alici is very much in use in the west…
- ggm 6mo agoI found the 'not common' comment in the original article quite confounding. It is somewhat specific, yes But the general sense "anchovies and anchovy paste adds umami" is really strongly established. So it's become much more specific, but it still exists.
- GavinMcG 6mo agoI wouldn’t imagine most people consider anchovy paste a sauce?
- ggm 6mo ago"sauce" is such an imprecise concept. Fish Sauce is a condiment. Anchovy paste is often used as a condiment/additive e.g. on a ceaser salad, or to perk up a pizza. 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.
- IamTC 6mo agoTry fish sauce with pasta sauces. Next level.
- 01100011 6mo agoI put some in the ground beef when I make burgers.
- dbcooper 6mo agoInteresting video on the history of Worcestershire Sauce (fermented anchovy base): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q5QhGnEKUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q5QhGnEKUM Addendum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvF2m57_Usg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvF2m57_Usg
- Magi604 6mo agoWow, Legalnomads! Happy to see her pop up here. Way back in the day when I used to backpack and freelance she had a very big online presence in the internet hustler community. I just read through her recent history and I'm sad for her recent health issues, but glad she's still pushing through.
- legalnomads 6mo agoThank you, it's been quite a crazy decade. Really lucky that I got those years of travel and food and building my business the way I wanted. Seems like a fever dream now that I don't know if I'll ever be able to tie my shoes again. Waiting for medicine to evolve, but at least I can still use my platform to help raise awareness. And, you know, write about fish sauce :)
- wluu 6mo agoIf anyone needs a Vege friendly fish sauce, here's one for Lao/Thai food https://www.veganlaofood.com/recipe/fish-sauce/ https://www.veganlaofood.com/recipe/fish-sauce/ It's pretty simple to make.
- lobofta 6mo agoThanks. It is too bad so few people think of fish as the sentient beings that they are.
- kulahan 6mo agoI don't think many people are confused on the sentience of fish... nor that telling people this would get them to stop eating fish anyways. It's a pretty important source of protein for much of the world.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- ggm 6mo agoI wish somebody would do this for "Smen" from North Africa, and trace it's lineage and relationship. I'm told if you want a sense of it, add knobs of soft blue cheese to your cuscous.
- youngprogrammer 6mo agoFish sauce is delicious but had to stop using it since it's high in histamine (gives me a stuffy nose) and potentially carcinogenic due to its high levels of nitrosamines
- nunez 6mo ago> One such food historian, Sally Grainger, notes in her 2021 book The Story of Garum: Fermented Fish Sauce and Salted Fish in the Ancient World that despite discussions of Roman fish sauce in many publications, Roman fish sauce is not actually Roman at all: it’s Greek. 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!
- adrian_b 6mo agoThe argument in favor of Cato's cheesecake being of Greek origin is that it had a Greek name. 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.
- nunez 6mo ago> One such food historian, Sally Grainger, notes in her 2021 book The Story of Garum: Fermented Fish Sauce and Salted Fish in the Ancient World that despite discussions of Roman fish sauce in many publications, Roman fish sauce is not actually Roman at all: it’s Greek. 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!
- cs02rm0 6mo agoA couple of years ago I planned a road trip I've yet to take, from where I live in Worcestershire, passing through Malaga where they have a glass pyramid in front of a Roman theatre that shows the basins that were used for making garum. Worcestershire sauce is a descendent of garum.
- comrade1234 6mo agoColatura di Alici is fish sauce made from anchovies in the same Roman town since the Roman republic. It was used by everyone on everything and also traveled with soldiers across Europe during the empire. It's nice - it tastes "softer" than the Asian fish sauces. 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.
- fransje26 6mo ago> I also buy from Italians at a farmers market here in Switzerland rotten anchovies packed in salt and ground peppercorns. Does this condiment have a specific name?
- scythe 6mo agoI have a bottle of Colatura di Alici in my fridge. It's great when I remember to use it. But it costs about ten times as much as a Southeast Asian fish sauce, which is a natural consequence of only being produced in one town in Italy.
- zachdotai 6mo agoWhy did I read this title and immediately think Ketchup?
- legalnomads 6mo agoKetchup did used to have fermented fish in it too!
- legalnomads 6mo agoThank you for sharing my piece!