A modern recreation of garum, a fermented fish sauce that goes back to Roman times
Alexander Mychko / Alamy
Fermented fish sauce or grim was an incredibly popular spice through the new empire. For the first time, the old DNA – scraped from VAT, used to produce the sauce – dreams exactly that fish species went into the culinary staple.
Roman Fish Sauce was appreciated for its salt and umami flavor – although the philosopher Seneca famously described a version as “the overpriced gut of rotten fish”. It came in several forms, including a liquid sauce called Garum or Liquamen, as well as a fixed pasta known as AlleC. To prepare the spice crushed and fermented fish, a process that can make visual identification of the species difficult or impossible.
“In addition to the fact that bones are extremely small and broken, that old age and acid conditions all contribute to the degradation of DNA,” says Paula Campos at the University of Porto in Portugal.
Campos and her colleagues ran DNA sequencing tests on bone samples from about the 3rd century AD, which was extracted from Roman fishing salt plant in northwestern Spain. They are able to compare more overlapping DNA sequences and match them with a full fishing genome, giving the team “more confidence that we identify the right species,” says Campos.
The identified effort that the fish remains as European sardines-a finding, which is in accordance with previous visual identification of sardine, remains in other fish-life lives. Other Garum production sites have also included remnants of additional fishing speeches such as herring, whiting, mackerel and anchovy.
This evidence that “broken down fish remains” can give identifiable DNA “can help identify with more precision some regional variations in the most important ingredients in the old fish sauces and pastes,” says Annalisa Marzano at the University of Bologna in Italy, who did not participate in the study.
The study also compared DNA from old and modern sardines to show that there was less genetic blend of sardine populations from different oatmeal in ancient times. This insight can help “assess the effects of people and the environment interaction for centuries,” says Marzano.
For their next step, Campos and her colleagues plan to analyze other fish species from additional novel-era garum production sites. “We are expanding the sampling rental to see if the results consist of the whole new empire,” she says.
Topics: