Garum: The Fish Sauce That Ruled Roman Cooking
If you could taste one flavour that defined Roman cooking, it would not be a spice or a herb. It would be garum — a pungent, savoury fish sauce that the Romans splashed into almost everything, from meat and vegetables to sauces and even some sweet dishes. To modern ears it sounds strange, even off-putting. To a Roman, a kitchen without it was barely a kitchen at all.
What Garum Actually Was
Garum was made by fermenting fish — often small, oily species like anchovies, sardines, and mackerel, along with fish blood and innards — with a large quantity of salt. Packed into open vats and left in the sun for weeks or months, the mixture broke down through the action of its own enzymes and salt-tolerant bacteria into a clear, amber, intensely savoury liquid. That liquid was drained off as the finished sauce, and the process, though it smelled powerfully enough that production was often pushed to the edges of towns, produced something prized across the empire.
Roman writers used several overlapping names. Garum and liquamen referred to the prized strained liquid; allec (or hallec) was the thicker fishy paste left behind, a cheaper relish in its own right; and muria was a saltier, coarser by-product. The distinctions blurred over the centuries, and by late antiquity liquamen was the common term — but the principle never changed: salt, plus fish, plus time, equals umami.
Why the Romans Put It on Everything
We now have a word for what garum delivered: umami, the deep savoury "fifth taste" carried by glutamates. Fermentation concentrates exactly those compounds, so a spoonful of garum made simple food taste richer, rounder, and more complete — much as a dash of fish sauce, soy sauce, or Worcestershire sauce does today.
The cookbook attributed to Apicius, our fullest window onto elite Roman cooking, calls for garum again and again, frequently in place of salt. It seasoned roast meats, dressed vegetables and eggs, and formed the base of countless sauces alongside wine, vinegar, honey, herbs, and pepper. It even turned up in sweet and medicinal preparations: Roman physicians prescribed garum and its by-products for ailments from ulcers to dysentery, and a honey-and-garum mixture called oenogarum was a common dressing. It was, in effect, the Roman kitchen's default seasoning — as ordinary and as essential as salt is to us.
An Industry, Not a Cottage Craft
Because demand was enormous, garum became big business. Production centres — the cetariae, workshops full of salting vats — clustered around good fishing grounds and salt supplies: the coasts of southern Spain (Roman Baetica and Lusitania), North Africa, Brittany, the Black Sea, and towns like Pompeii, where excavated workshops, vats, and labelled containers survive. Sites such as Baelo Claudia in Spain preserve whole ranks of the great tanks in which the fish was salted and left to transform.
The sauce was shipped across the Mediterranean in pottery amphorae, some still bearing painted labels (tituli picti) naming the maker, the type of fish, and the grade — an early form of branded, traceable food packaging. Through this trade, a sauce made on a Spanish beach could season a dinner in Rome, Gaul, or Roman Britain.
A Sauce for Every Purse
Garum spanned the whole social scale. Cheap, coarse versions salted the meals of ordinary people and soldiers, while a luxury grade known as garum sociorum ("garum of the allies"), made from mackerel in Spain, could reach astonishing prices — the fine olive oil or aged vintage of its day, a status symbol as much as an ingredient. There were even special varieties to suit religious dietary rules, including a garum castus acceptable to Jewish communities. Few foods so neatly tracked a person's rank and identity as the particular garum on their table.
Why It Faded — and Where It Survives
Garum did not truly vanish so much as transform. As the western empire fragmented, the large-scale coastal industries that produced it broke down, and medieval European cooking drifted toward other seasonings — though in the Byzantine East, fish sauce lingered far longer. But the idea never fully died along the Mediterranean.
Its clearest living descendant is colatura di alici, an amber anchovy sauce still made in the Italian fishing village of Cetara on the Amalfi Coast by salting and pressing anchovies — essentially garum by another name, and a direct thread back to antiquity. Farther afield, Southeast Asian fish sauces like Vietnamese nước mắm and Thai nam pla arrive at a strikingly similar result by a similar method, which is why they make such convincing substitutes.
In the Roman Kitchen, Dish by Dish
To see how thoroughly garum saturated Roman cooking, look at how it was actually used. Apicius dresses boiled vegetables with a splash of garum, oil, and a little wine; poaches fish in it; and builds complex sauces for roast meat and poultry by pounding herbs and spices — pepper, lovage, cumin, coriander — with garum, honey, vinegar, and defrutum (reduced grape must). The sauce called oenogarum, garum blended with wine, was a workhorse dressing, while oxygarum, cut with vinegar, sharpened heavier dishes and was even taken as a digestive.
It reached beyond savoury cooking, too. Romans stirred garum into egg dishes, used it to cure and flavour other foods, and valued its by-products as cheap relishes for the poor. A soldier on campaign, a dockworker buying a bowl of stew, and a senator hosting a banquet might all be tasting the same fermented fish sauce — simply at different grades. Understanding garum, in other words, is close to understanding the base note of the entire Roman diet: remove it, and much of what the Romans ate would taste strangely flat to them.
How to Taste It Today
You don't need to bury fish in your garden for a month. To cook something close to a Roman dish, reach for colatura di alici if you can find it, or a good Southeast Asian fish sauce as a stand-in. Use it as the Romans used garum: a few drops to season a braise, a sauce, or a dressing, in place of some of the salt. Balance it, as they did, with wine or vinegar for acidity and a little honey for sweetness, and you'll taste why an entire empire built its cooking around fermented fish — and why that savoury depth still anchors so much of how we cook.
Source note
This article is based on the picture food historians and archaeologists have assembled from Roman texts (notably the recipes attributed to Apicius and mentions in Pliny and others), inscriptions and painted labels on surviving amphorae, and excavated production sites such as those at Pompeii and along the Spanish and North African coasts. Ancient terms like garum, liquamen, and allec were used loosely, and exact recipes and grades varied by region and period.
Frequently asked questions
What was garum made of?
Garum was made by fermenting small oily fish such as anchovies, sardines and mackerel (often with the innards) in a large amount of salt, left in the sun for weeks or months. The clear, amber, intensely savoury liquid drawn off was the finished sauce.
What did garum taste like?
Deeply savoury and salty — what we now call umami. A spoonful made food taste richer and rounder, much as a dash of fish sauce, soy sauce or Worcestershire sauce does today, without tasting overtly 'fishy' in the finished dish.
Is garum still made today?
Its closest living descendant is colatura di alici, an amber anchovy sauce still made in the Italian village of Cetara — essentially garum by another name. Southeast Asian fish sauces like Vietnamese nuoc mam reach a very similar result and make good substitutes.
What was garum used for?
Almost everything. The Roman cookbook of Apicius calls for it constantly, often in place of salt — seasoning meat, fish, vegetables and eggs, and forming the base of countless sauces alongside wine, vinegar and honey.
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