A contemporary recreation of garum, a fermented fish sauce courting again to Roman occasions
Alexander Mychko / Alamy
Fermented fish sauce, or garum, was an extremely standard condiment all through the Roman Empire. For the primary time, historic DNA – scraped from vats used to provide the sauce – has revealed precisely which fish species went into the culinary staple.
Roman fish sauce was prized for its salty and umami flavours – though the thinker Seneca famously described one model as “the overpriced guts of rotten fish”. It got here in a number of varieties, together with a liquid sauce referred to as garum or liquamen, in addition to a strong paste often known as allec. To organize the condiment, fish-salting vegetation crushed and fermented fish, a course of that may make visible identification of the species tough or unimaginable.
“Past the truth that bones are extraordinarily small and fractured, the outdated age and the acidic circumstances all contribute to degradation of DNA,” says Paula Campos on the College of Porto in Portugal.
Campos and her colleagues ran DNA sequencing assessments on bony samples from roughly the third century AD, extracted from a Roman fish-salting plant in north-west Spain. They have been capable of examine a number of overlapping DNA sequences and match them to a full fish genome, giving the staff “extra confidence that we determine the right species”, says Campos.
The hassle recognized the fish stays as European sardines – a discovering that aligns with earlier visible identification of sardine stays in different Roman-era fish-salting vegetation. Different garum manufacturing websites have additionally contained remnants of further fish species akin to herring, whiting, mackerel and anchovy.
This proof that “degraded fish stays” can yield identifiable DNA “may assist determine with extra precision some regional variations in the principle elements of the traditional fish sauces and pastes”, says Annalisa Marzano on the College of Bologna in Italy, who didn’t take part within the examine.
The examine additionally in contrast the DNA of historic and fashionable sardines to indicate there was much less genetic mixing of sardine populations from totally different ocean areas in historic occasions. That perception might assist “assess the consequences of human-environment interplay over the centuries”, says Marzano.
For his or her subsequent step, Campos and her colleagues plan to analyse different fish species from further Roman-era garum manufacturing websites. “We’re increasing the sampling areas to see if the outcomes are constant throughout your entire Roman Empire,” she says.
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