The Lost Ancient Roman Sauces Every Kitchen Has Forgotten
Ask what defined Roman cooking and the answer is not a single ingredient but a technique: the sauce. Roman cooks built their reputation on complex, layered sauces that dressed meat, fish, vegetables, and eggs — sauces that balanced salt, sweet, and sour in ways that can startle a modern palate. Most have been utterly forgotten, yet the recipes survive, and with them a lost art of flavour worth rediscovering.
The Foundation: Garum and the Savoury Base
Almost every Roman sauce began with garum (also called liquamen), the fermented fish sauce that supplied salt and deep umami. It was the Roman equivalent of reaching for salt and stock at once, and it anchored the savoury base of the sauce. From it came variations that were themselves sauces: oenogarum, garum blended with wine, and oxygarum, garum sharpened with vinegar — versatile dressings spooned over roast meat, fish, and vegetables. To understand Roman sauces is first to understand that their salt came from fish, not a cellar.
Sweet and Sour: Defrutum, Passum, and Honey
Against that salty base, Roman cooks played sweetness and acidity. Sweetness came from honey and from defrutum and sapa — grape must boiled down to a dark, syrupy concentrate that added body and colour as well as sugar. Passum, a sweet raisin wine, brought fruity depth. Acidity came from wine vinegar and acetum, and from sour fruit juices. The genius of the Roman sauce lay in balancing these poles — the interplay of garum's salt, honey's sweetness, and vinegar's bite — a sweet-sour-savoury harmony that runs through the whole of the cookbook attributed to Apicius, our richest source for these lost recipes.
The Aromatics: A Forgotten Palette
Into this base went a distinctive set of aromatics, some of them now unfamiliar. Lovage (a celery-like herb the Romans adored), cumin, coriander seed, black and long pepper, mint, rue, celery seed, oregano, and bay all appear again and again. Rarer still was laser, the resin of the now-extinct silphium, whose flavour Romans lavished on their finest sauces before the plant was harvested to extinction and replaced by asafoetida. Pine nuts, dates, and almonds were pounded in for richness and thickening. This aromatic palette — herb-heavy, resinous, and warm — is a large part of what makes Roman sauces taste both ancient and alien.
The Technique: Pounding and Thickening
A Roman sauce was made in the mortar. Cooks pounded herbs, spices, nuts, and aromatics into a paste, then let it down with the liquids — garum, wine, vinegar, honey, defrutum — and warmed it through. To thicken, they used amulum (wheat starch) or beaten eggs, producing sauces with real body, closer to a modern gravy or a thick vinaigrette than to a thin dressing. The famous ius in ovis apalis, a pine-nut sauce for soft eggs, and the many sauces "for roast meats" and "for boiled fish" in Apicius all follow this method: pound, loosen, balance, thicken. It is a technique any modern cook can revive with a mortar or a blender.
Sauces for Every Dish
Apicius offers sauces tailored to particular foods, revealing how central they were. There are sauces for boiled and roasted meats, for game and poultry, for fish of every kind, and for vegetables and eggs. Many were designed to rescue plain or preserved ingredients — a bold sauce could transform salt fish or a simple roast into something worthy of a banquet. Others were showpieces in their own right, dense with costly spices and imported ingredients that advertised a host's wealth. The sauce, in Roman dining, was where a cook proved his skill and a host displayed his status.
A Roman Sauce, Step by Step
To see how it worked, picture a sauce for roast pork in the Apician style. Begin in a mortar with a few peppercorns, a little cumin, and a pinch of dried lovage, and pound them to a coarse powder. Add a spoonful of pine nuts or a soft date and work them in to give body and a hint of sweetness. Now loosen the paste with liquids: a splash of garum (or fish sauce) for salt and savour, a little wine, a dash of vinegar for brightness, and a small spoon of honey or reduced grape must for sweetness.
Warm the mixture gently in a pan, taste, and adjust the three poles — more garum for savour, more vinegar for sharpness, more honey for roundness — until it sings. If you want it thicker, stir in a little starch slaked in water, or a beaten egg yolk off the heat, and cook until it coats a spoon. Spoon it over the sliced roast, and you have something no modern sauce quite resembles: salty, sweet, sour, and aromatic all at once. It takes minutes, uses a handful of pantry ingredients, and lets you taste, directly, the logic of a cuisine two thousand years old.
Sauces for Fish and the Fast Table
Rome's love of sauces extended across every kind of food, and fish in particular came dressed in an array of them. Apicius offers sauces "for all kinds of boiled fish" and for grilled and fried fish alike, typically built on the familiar frame — garum, wine, vinegar, honey, and pounded herbs and spices — but tuned to the delicacy of the dish, sometimes brightened with more herbs or lifted with pepper and lovage. A whole poached fish might be served under a green, herb-heavy sauce; a fried one under something sharper.
These fish sauces reveal the logic of Roman cooking especially clearly: the sauce was where flavour was constructed, and it could be adjusted endlessly to suit the ingredient. A single well-stocked kitchen, armed with garum, wine, vinegar, honey, defrutum, and a rack of herbs and spices, could dress any fish, meat, or vegetable in a dozen different ways. To lose these sauces, as later Europe largely did, was to lose not just a set of recipes but a whole flexible, improvisational approach to seasoning — one that a modern cook, armed with a mortar and a bottle of fish sauce, can readily rediscover.
Why They Were Lost — and How to Find Them Again
Roman sauces faded for the same reasons the empire's other flavours did. The collapse of the garum industry removed their savoury foundation; silphium went extinct, taking a signature note with it; and medieval and later European cooking drifted toward different techniques and tastes, eventually toward the herb-forward, stock-and-butter sauces of French cuisine. The Roman style — fish-salted, sweet-sour, resinous — simply fell out of the Western repertoire.
Yet these sauces are surprisingly easy to bring back. Substitute a good fish sauce or colatura for garum, reduce grape juice for defrutum, use asafoetida where silphium is called for, and lean on lovage, cumin, and pepper for the aromatics. Balance salt, sweet, and sour to taste, thicken with a little starch or egg, and you can spoon a genuinely Roman sauce over your dinner tonight — a direct taste of a lost culinary art that once flavoured an empire.
Source note
The recipes and techniques described here come chiefly from the cookbook attributed to Apicius (De re coquinaria), our fullest surviving record of elite Roman cooking, supplemented by mentions in other classical authors. Apicius rarely gives quantities, so any reconstruction involves judgement and substitution; ingredients such as garum, defrutum, and silphium are approximated with modern equivalents, and exact proportions are lost.
Frequently asked questions
What were Roman sauces made from?
Almost every Roman sauce began with garum (fermented fish sauce) for salt and savour, balanced with honey, defrutum (reduced grape must) or passum for sweetness, and wine vinegar for acidity — the sweet-sour-savoury harmony at the heart of Roman cooking.
How did Romans thicken their sauces?
Pounded in a mortar and let down with liquids, then thickened with amulum (wheat starch) or beaten eggs — producing sauces with real body, closer to a modern gravy or thick vinaigrette than a thin dressing.
Can you make Roman sauces today?
Yes, quite easily: substitute a good fish sauce or colatura for garum, reduce grape juice for defrutum, use asafoetida where silphium is called for, and lean on lovage, cumin and pepper — then balance salt, sweet and sour to taste.
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