A contemporary recreation of garum, a fermented fish sauce relationship again to Roman instances
Alexander Mychko / Alamy
Fermented fish sauce, or garum, was an extremely in style condiment all through the Roman Empire. For the primary time, historical 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 types, together with a liquid sauce referred to as garum or liquamen, in addition to a strong paste often called allec. To arrange the condiment, fish-salting crops crushed and fermented fish, a course of that may make visible identification of the species troublesome or unattainable.
“Past the truth that bones are extraordinarily small and fractured, the previous age and the acidic situations all contribute to degradation of DNA,” says Paula Campos on the College of Porto in Portugal.
Campos and her colleagues ran DNA sequencing exams on bony samples from roughly the third century AD, extracted from a Roman fish-salting plant in north-west Spain. They had been capable of examine a number of overlapping DNA sequences and match them to a full fish genome, giving the crew “extra confidence that we determine the proper species”, says Campos.
The trouble recognized the fish stays as European sardines – a discovering that aligns with earlier visible identification of sardine stays in different Roman-era fish-salting crops. Different garum manufacturing websites have additionally contained remnants of further fish species reminiscent of 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 research.
The research additionally in contrast the DNA of historical and trendy sardines to point out there was much less genetic mixing of sardine populations from completely different ocean areas in historical instances. 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 places to see if the outcomes are constant throughout the whole Roman Empire,” she says.
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