Garos and garum (fermented fish sauce)
Garo y garum (salsa de pescado fermentada)
- Date
- c. 500 BCE · confidence low
- Place
- Gadir (Cádiz), Andalusia, Spain
- Credited to
- Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans
- Field
- Life & health
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
A liquid sauce of fish and fish viscera fermented in salt in the sun, a basic seasoning of the ancient Mediterranean. The salting factories of the Andalusian Atlantic coast produced it commercially and exported it in amphorae.
The Greek term garos appears in a fragment of Aeschylus (5th century BC); Phoenician-Punic industrial production at Gadir and the Roman kind (garum sociorum) are later or poorly dated. Fermented fish sauces arose independently in Southeast Asia.
What it led to
- the salting industry of the Mediterranean and Baetica
- trade in garum amphorae across the Roman Empire
- Asian fish sauces and ketchup (kê-tsiap) by convergence