leave a barrel of dead fish out in the
hot mediterranean sun for two months
and you're going to have a rancid putrid
mess but leave a barrel of dead fish and
salt out in the hot mediterranean sun
for two months
and you're going to have one of ancient
rome's most prized and off-used
condiments
garum so today i'm going to teach you
how to make your own garam at home
in a lot less than two months and
without offending your neighbors
so smash that like button the way caesar
smashed pompy's army at the battle of
farceless
and get ready to learn about garum this
time
on tasting history
garum sometimes called liquid is
fermented
fish sauce and before you say er
you have to realize that we still have
fermented fish sauces with us today
worcestershire sauce is made with
fermented anchovies and
different varieties of fermented fish
sauce can be found throughout cuisines
in east asia nam pla in thailand nuoc
mam in vietnam
and ekjot from korea just to name a few
and i am
apologizing for my pronunciation of
probably all of those sauces
and in the small fishing village of
chittara in campania italy
they make something called koletura
dialichi
which translates to anchovy drippings
and is probably
a direct descendant of garum if you
don't want to make your own garum you
can go ahead and use this
as a good substitute i will put a link
in the description where you can find
some
but since tasting history is all about
trying to recreate
the dishes of the past rather than just
by their modern cousins i decided to
make my own garum
now when i ventured down this fool's
path
i assumed it would take me a couple
months because the traditional way
of making garum like the ancient romans
did
would be to take a large vessel put a
layer of
whole fish then a layer of herbs and
then a thick layer of salt about two
fingers thick
and then just layer that up all the way
until you fill
the entire vessel put a stopper in it
and set it out in the sun
for two months every once in a while
kind of plunging it and
mixing up all the juices and i was going
to do this for you
the viewer who i care for so much
but then a friend of mine who had
ventured to laos
told me about a run-in he had with the
factories that make
their fermented fish sauce and he
basically said
you cannot do that living in a condo
surrounded by neighbors they would
probably call the cops thinking that
there was a dead body over here
so i was disheartened but i kept up my
research into roman cuisine anyway
and i'm so glad that i did because i
found out that making garum is covered
extensively in a work called the
geoponica
which dates from the 10th century and is
from byzantium which is the eastern
roman empire and it's said that it's
based on a sixth century
latin treatise now it actually mentions
five different recipes
for garum and some of them have wine
some of them have different fish
different ways of preparing the garum
but i'm going to read you
two just to spare you from reading all
five
the best garum called hymation is made
as follows
take the entrails of tuni fish and its
gills
juice and blood and sufficient salt
sprinkled on
leave it in a vessel for two months at
most then pierce the vessel
and the garum called hymation will flow
out kind of reminds me of that little
spigot on the bottom of our cold brew
jar
and i'm guessing that just like the cold
brew a tall ice glass of garum in the
morning will really get you going
but it's this next recipe that rekindled
my hope of making my own garum at home
because clearly the author of the
giaponica knew that sometimes you just
can't wait for your fish juice fix
if you wish to use the garam at once i.e
not expose it to the sun
but boil it make it in the following
manner take
brine and test its strength by throwing
an egg into it to see if it floats
if it sinks it does not contain enough
salt
put the fish into the brine in a new
earthenware pot
add oregano put it on the fire until it
boils
i.e until it begins to reduce some
people also add defrutum
let it cool and strain it two or three
times until the liquid is clear
seal and store it away now defroutum is
a syrup that's made from reducing
must which is freshly crushed grape
juice with the stems
seeds and skins in there and i don't
have any of that right now so i decided
not to use it and that's okay because he
does say
some people use de frutum and i ain't
some people
so with the geoponica giving us full
permission to make
quick garum let's do it first you'll
need about two quarts of water
then a ton of sea salt probably close to
a pound it's going to depend on
different things like the salt the water
and the temperature of it but
he gives us instructions on how to tell
when it's ready so we will do that with
the egg
later on then some dried oregano i went
with two heaping teaspoons
then if you want you can add some
diffusum if you have it
or have musk that you can reduce i'm not
going to one because i don't have it and
two because i want star of the dish
the the fish to really shine through but
you can also use
honey there are records of honey being
used or other kind of sweet things so
go ahead and use it if you want then
you'll need about two pounds of small
whole fish
you can use mackerel or sardines or
anchovies or herring anything that is a
an oily fish now they also use tuna as
as in that first recipe the tony fish
but
i mean how much are you making a tuna is
like this big so
stick with mackerel at most because even
a mackerel is kind of big
lastly you'll need that egg that i
mentioned but that's more of a tool
rather
than an ingredient so first we make our
brine
go ahead and start adding salt to the
water
i'd start with about 400 grams at first
and then work your way
up i ended up using just over 400 grams
i ended up switching pots because
the large pot is actually better for
making
this but but the small pot was better
for testing it with the egg because the
large
pot the the egg wasn't even covered so
it couldn't tell but mix it in
and every once in a while put the egg in
there and once it floats
stop adding salt now if you end up
adding too much salt that's okay
it's just gonna fall to the bottom um
not a huge deal
then the recipe says to add the fish to
the brine in a fresh earthenware pot
i don't have that so i ended up using a
stock pot
so add the whole fish to the water and
the oregano
and stir everything together then it's
time to boil it so put the pot over high
heat
and let the fire do its work you're
going to boil it for between 30 and 40
minutes and every 10 minutes
go ahead and kind of give that fish a
mashing with your spoon just to break it
up
should break up after the first 10. so
as your house fills with the scent of
boiling fish my cat loved it by the way
i'm going to show you
why garum was such a popular condiment
in ancient rome
[Music]
no garum lordly garum
the taste of the sea there was no
end to the accolades that ancient
writers put
on garum pliny the elder called it
choice liquor
and his favorite was garum sokkiyorum
often translated as garum of comrades
it was made of macro and came from
southern spain and he said that
scarcely any other liquid except perfume
has become more highly valued
and while not all garum enjoyed such a
price tag
it did become quite the booming business
in the roman empire
it's thought that garum started in
greece with a sauce called
garros probably made from a fish called
garros which is the netflix remake of a
fish called wanda but when rome took
over greece
the gatos took over rome and became
garum
see the romans didn't really salt their
food so instead in pretty much every
recipe that we have from antiquity
they use garum to impart sodium to their
dishes and in doing so
it also gave a certain umami flavor
which the romans must have
loved because in the most famous
collection of roman recipes that we have
dere coquinaria nearly every recipe uses
it though by then it was
called liqueman but that is the story
for another day
not surprisingly it was used in fish
dishes and meat dishes
and in most of the sauces but it also
found its way into vegetable dishes and
fruit dishes and used as a salad
dressing and
even in some of the dulcia recipes or
sweets because fish sauce in dessert
what could go wrong and it wasn't just
used as flavoring
because it was quite the cure-all if
galen had anything to say about it
now you might remember galen from the
episode on the black plague cures
which i'll put down in the description
below galen thought that
foods controlled the the humors in your
body which
control your health every food had some
degree of hotness dryness coldness or
wetness
and garum was no exception he says that
garum has the considerable capacity
for heat and dryness and on account of
this some doctors treat putrefying
ulcers with it
and inject it into people with dysentery
and sciatica
now if you take anything away from this
video it should be that despite what
galen says you should
never ever inject anyone with fermented
fish sauce
ever also while in one writing galen
says that it's
a treatment for diarrhea in another he
says it's a treatment for constipation
so
just kind of seems like wacky galen's
miracle tonic i don't trust this gala
guy
pliny the elder who i usually think of
as a little bit more reputable
says that it was a good treatment for
dog bites and earaches
and if you had stomach troubles then the
best cure was to eat african snails
marinated in garum oh but it needs to be
an
odd number of snails because that's a
thing
but while it was medicinal to some
others thought that the condiment
exacerbated gout
caused melancholy and destroyed your
teeth so i don't know who to believe
but regardless the fact that it was in
almost every roman dish
and it was used as medicine means that
it had become
quite the precious commodity by the time
the empire took off
garum factories were sprouting up all
around the mediterranean
in judea they made a kosher version for
the jewish population
and in pompeii it was known as gadifloss
skombri
or the flower of garum now production
centers tend to be of course
on the coast because plenty of salt
and moving fish probably expensive but
also because the fish had to be
very fresh the poet marshall said except
this
exquisite garam a precious gift made
with the first blood
spilled from a living mackerel but as
the empire's greed for garum grew
coastal towns had to say hold your
horses this stuff stinks
there was a byzantine regulation from
the hexablos that stated that any new
garum factories
needed to be built three states away
from any village or town
it's about three-eighths of a mile i'm
not even sure that that would be enough
so yeah lovely as the flavor might be
there were some
that had less than great things to say
about it
in an epicurean tirade seneca the
younger said
what do you not think that the so-called
sauce from the provinces
the costly extract of poisonous fish
burns up the stomach with its salted
putrefaction
what do you not judge that the corrupted
dishes which a man swallows
almost burning from the kitchen fire are
quenched in the digestive system without
doing harm
how repulsive then and how unhealthy are
their belchings
and how disgusted men are with
themselves when they breathe forth the
fumes of yesterday's debauch
you may be sure that their food is not
being digested
but is rotting not exactly commercial
copy for garum there
and even plenty the elder and marshall
had trouble making up their mind about
how they really felt
about garum marshall once commended a
young man for making romantic advances
toward a woman who had already had six
helpings of the stuff that night
and plenty of the elder who had called
it proud sauce and exquisite liquor
also described garum as the guts of fish
and other parts that would otherwise be
considered refuse
so that garum is really the secretion of
putrefying matter
and he's kind of right but to be
pedantic
it is not putrid but rather fermented
with the salt there to stop putrefaction
the breakdown actually comes from
enzymes in the fish's own digestive
system
so that essentially it's digesting
itself
over the period of several months kind
of like the sarlacc pit
anyway let's get back to our own sarlacc
pit in the kitchen
so once the fish has boiled for 30 to 40
minutes take it off the heat
and let it cool then pour it through a
colander
now it says to strain it two or three
times
i ended up doing it like seven times
making a huge mess while doing it
because i started with cheesecloth i
wouldn't do that it's it's
it's just not not enough um the best
thing that i actually used
was a paper towel and then a tea towel
so here is my bottle of garum a nice
kind of pale yellow color
also if you are bottling this because
it's going to last
forever due to the high salt content but
you do need to make sure that the
bottles have been sterilized
so you know boil those bottles now
usually this is where i would taste the
food that we've made so
i would just take a swig of this but if
you've ever taken the latin course from
duolingo
as we all have one of the first things
you learn is garum non bibis
or you do not drink garum
but i really want to try it in its pure
form before i add it to another dish
and luckily pliny the elder says that if
you dilute it to the color of honey wine
you can go ahead and drink it so before
i try it um
i've diluted a glass here i'm going to
first tell you how it smells
in its purest form so
fishy smells very
fishy okay
so i'm going to try this in the name of
science but before i do
i want to let you know that next week
i'm actually going to use the garum for
its intended purpose
which is as an ingredient i'm going to
be making mithulis
or mussels as described in the dere
coquinaria
by apikus and that's what we'll be
talking about so make sure to hit that
notification bell when you subscribe so
you'll be notified when that comes out
okay
enough stalling here we go
garum oh i feel like
that episode of friends where ross is
going to drink the fat
it's just a vanilla milkshake with
pieces of
fish in it there aren't actually pieces
of fish it's been well strained but okay
here we go
enough
so whoever said that it was the taste of
the sea
is right it tastes like
the ocean it's not actually as fishy as
i thought it's more of just like
salt watery um it it tastes like the
ocean
i think that it actually might be a very
nice ingredient that said i'm not going
to be putting it on a salad
and i'm definitely not going to be
finishing this glass so
yeah anyway please like subscribe and i
will see you next time
on tasting history