
Did fish sauce in Vietnam come from ancient Rome via the Silk Road? - Thevet
https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/food-drink/article/3094604/did-fish-sauce-vietnam-come-ancient-rome-silk-road
======
dnprock
I'd make the case that fish sauces were independently developed by different
cultures. I think historians are overly trying to make connections in this
case.

Fish sauce is very simple. You only need two ingredients: fish and salt. Any
cultures living near an ocean can independently develop some version of fish
sauce.

If there's any link between Vietnam and Rome, we'd have found traces of them
along the Silk Road or maritime routes.

In Vietnam, besides fish sauce, there are other sauces "mam" made from
different fishes and seafoods. Vietnamese people may have developed these
"mam" before they developed the current fish sauce. Their fish sauce may have
come from other "mam" than Rome.

Side note: The article appears on South China Morning Post. China often sees
Vietnam as barbaric, inferior. Maybe, they couldn't see how Vietnamese could
invent such a good sauce. :)

~~~
himinlomax
> Fish sauce is very simple

I'm not so sure. Rotten fish is extremely gross. The notion that it's not when
fermented in salt is not entirely obvious. Having said that, it is definitely
obvious as a byproduct of fish preservation. If people start producing dried
salted fish, someone is bound to notice that the juice is actually tasty. I
wonder how commonly available sea salt was in East Asia compared to the
Mediterranean. It is saltier and has a much drier climate and thus producing
lots of salt is easier.

~~~
pampa
So is smelly or mouldy french cheese. I think a lot of fermented products are
basically preservation techniques gone sideways.

Smells funny, looks funny but doesn't make you sick when you eat it, you don't
just throw food away when it is scarce. And after some time you develop a
taste for it.

~~~
dan_hawkins
> I think a lot of fermented products are basically preservation techniques
> gone sideways.

My theory also :) Given historical harsh winters in Europe you're gonna eat
whatever there is in the middle of a winter, spoiled or not. Turned out some
of that spoiled stuff is quite good.

------
peteretep
In Thailand, I like to eat Sriracha sauce. The type I get at the supermarket,
it's been manufactured in the US by Vietnamese immigrants, and then imported
to Thailand, but of course Sriracha (ศรีราชา) is actually a place in Thailand
(and the ultimate origin of the sauce, where it was created by _Burmese_
immigrants), so quite how I'm ending up eating American-Thai Burmese sauce via
Vietnam in Thailand I'm hoping will give future archeologists food for
thought.

~~~
pepicon
Not to mention that the pepper is originally from Mexico

------
hprotagonist
Stranger things have happened. Like the viking buddha:
[http://irisharchaeology.ie/2013/12/the-helgo-treasure-a-
viki...](http://irisharchaeology.ie/2013/12/the-helgo-treasure-a-viking-age-
buddha/)

material goods travel farther than the people who made them. And we are
increasingly finding that it was the case that ancient and medieval trade
routes were generally longer and more robust than we had once believed.

~~~
supernova87a
Reportedly there are villages along the Silk Road in remote western China,
where some people are blond haired, blue eyed, descendants of lost (or
decided-to-settle) traders or soldiers from centuries ago.

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/815449...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8154490/Chinese-
villagers-descended-from-Roman-soldiers.html)

~~~
DonaldFisk
The idea of a lost Roman legion in China isn't taken seriously by scholars.
See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liqian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liqian)

Further west along the silk road from Gansu, the earliest documented
inhabitants of Xinjiang were the Tocharians. They had brown, red, or blond
hair, spoke two different Indo-European languages (Tocharian A and B), and
were Buddhist. They're a more likely source of blond hair in western China.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharians)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarim_mummies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarim_mummies)

~~~
dboreham
The legion was lost in Scotland.

~~~
OG_BME
The legion was lost in Teutoburg Forest

Quintili Vare, legiones redde! (Quintilius Varus, give me back my legions!)

------
danans
The article makes the assumption that the direction was from Rome to Vietnam
and not the other way around, yet provides no hard evidence. The far more
plausible explanation is that it developed in both places independently given
that both places have plenty of fish and warm weather, and at some point,
during the silk road era, the two independent developments linked up.

~~~
throwaway2048
What makes that "far more plausible", plenty of warm places that eat lots of
fish don't have traditional fish sauces.

~~~
danans
Fish sauce to one culture is spoiled salty fish water to another. It's hardly
a universal taste. And I'm not biased, I love the stuff.

Also, a huge number of cultures have a tradition of eating dried salted fish.
Turning that into fish sauce is just dropping those into some water.

------
jrochkind1
> Believed to have medicinal properties, garum was used as a disinfectant, eye
> and ear cleanser, to treat burns and dog bites, and to fight high
> cholesterol.

Wait, the ancient Romans somehow knew about cholesterol? Um.

~~~
Bud
The Romans did have some knowledge and understanding of heart disease and
apparently at least tried to use various plants and such to enhance cardiac
health. I can't find anything about cholesterol specifically, but it's not out
of the realm of the possible...

------
droidno9
Phu Quoc is the most famous place in Vietnam that makes nuoc mam. The first
press of aged nuoc mam is highly prized by connoisseurs, but almost impossible
to use without first diluting it with water, as it is very salty and pungent.
With the right ratio of water, lime juice, and sugar, nuoc mam is the perfect
dipping sauce for much of Vietnamese cuisine. Knowing this, you'd be able to
guess with good accuracy if a dish had Chinese origin, because the dish would
be offered with a soy sauce-based dipping sauce instead.

P.S. Phu Quoc itself is a lovely place to enjoy the freshest seafood of all
varieties on the cheap. Rent a motorbike and you would be able to see most of
the island in just a few days.

~~~
huac
red boat fish sauce is a relatively accessible brand in America, made in phu
quoc
([https://redboatfishsauce.com/pages/about](https://redboatfishsauce.com/pages/about))

~~~
droidno9
Ditto. This is my go-to fish sauce. That said, it should be used as a dipping
sauce and not for cooking. There are cheaper fish sauce for cooking from
Vietnam or Thailand. Just make sure there are only three ingredients used to
make the sauce: anchovies, salt, and water. An easy way to tell if a fish
sauce is of decent quality is by looking for the degrees number on the front
and these three ingredients on the back.

~~~
bpicolo
> Just make sure there are only three ingredients used to make the sauce:
> anchovies, salt, and water

Almost all of the other, especially the cheaper sauces, have additional
ingredients. + fructose & hydrolyzed wheat protein for three crabs, for
example

------
ipsum2
Surprised they didn't mention Worcestershire sauce, which has very similar
flavor profiles to sauce used in Thai cuisine.

Edit: Worcestershire sauce's flavor comes from fermented fish + tamarind,
which also are two major ingredients in Thai/Vietnamese cooking.

~~~
ska
Do you think Worcestershire is particularly close compared to other fish
sauces? I don't really but I'm hardly "fluent" in thai cooking.

Fish sauce seems plausibly one of those commonly re-invented things.

~~~
mrob
It's not very similar. The fish in Worcestershire sauce is mild enough that
you might not notice it if you didn't know it was there. It's vinegar +
molasses + tamarind + salt + sugar + spices, with the fish just there for
added umami taste. Thai fish sauce is only fish + salt + sugar, and it's
unmistakably made from fish.

~~~
ska
Agree the fish sauce itself is clearly different, but I'm less confident about
the flavor profile as a whole. Maybe that's just because of the tamarind
though.

~~~
mark-r
I have a Pad Thai recipe that calls for both fish sauce and tamarind paste. Do
you think there's some connection?

------
contingencies
I am shocked that neither the article nor the discussion mentions that there
were second century Roman trade artifacts recovered by French archeologists at
Oc Eo[0] on the Mekong delta[1] (ancient Champa[2]; now An Giang, Vietnam).
Champa was the major pre-Vietnamese society in Vietnam and Cambodia whose
probable regional trading partners essentially correspond to the SEA cultural
sphere currently using fish sauce. Apparently Columbus tried to reach it at
one point! [3] Asian ancient history is fascinating.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%93c_Eo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%93c_Eo)
[1] [https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/3248251](https://sci-hub.tw/10.2307/3248251)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champa)
[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%93c_Eo#Columbus'_search_fo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%93c_Eo#Columbus'_search_for_Ciamba)

------
ed25519FUUU
I'm surprised the idea of independent discovery is so easily explained away in
modern history.

The recipe calls for fish + salt left for a period of time. This could have
been done by someone simply trying to preserve fish, not necessarily make a
sauce.

~~~
virtue3
I mean... sure, programming is just putting together 0 + 1 and calling it a
day too. I think you're severely downplaying how unlikely it is that this was
just "done". It smells like death, so it would be unlikely anyone would
necessarily want to eat it in the first place:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S7Bb0Qg-
oE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S7Bb0Qg-oE)

------
every
Was the culture maritime? Did the culture have their own practice or nearby
examples of fermentation? Is there some specific or difficult part of the
process that is unique? Does fish fermentation occur in areas with no ties to
Southeast Asia or the Mediterranean? I would want to answer these questions
before speculating on any possible links.

[Disclaimer] I did just this sort of thing researching the possible gold links
between Schliemann's Troy and the Royal Graves at Ur as a student...

------
babesh
Not sure about Vietnam but Southern China is very big on fermentation,
pickling, and salting and doing that to most every food: fish, vegetables,
eggs, etc... It’s quite possible it came from Rome but the basic techniques
are deeply embedded in the culture. I suspect that it is the case for most
cultures in that region of the world.

------
eindiran
This video covers how you can make garum using a modernized version of a
surviving recipe from the Geoponica:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S7Bb0Qg-
oE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S7Bb0Qg-oE)

------
codezero
This is off topic, but during my obsession with the discovery of the Everest
route in 1921, I was fascinated to learn that at that time there were Tibetan
and Nepalese (or just one sorry, need to fact check) that had elements of
Greek culture embedded in their leadership roles, holding a conch and a
trident, on a mountain! So neat that these cultural quirks could last so long,
assuming it really is a relic of some cultural sharing.

------
DonaldFisk
They're very similar, and when I cooked Ancient Roman recipes I used Thai fish
sauce (nam pla, Squid Brand) in place of liquamen (garum). Nuoc mam is much
the same thing as nam pla. So is colatura, which is still made in Italy.

Though there was indirect contact with China, from where they obtained silk,
and India, from where they obtained pepper, I'm unaware of any direct contact
between Ancient Rome and South East Asia, and I'm skeptical the recipe somehow
made its way as far as Vietnam and Thailand. I think it's more likely they
arrived at the same recipe independently.

Here's the production method for liquamen. It was done on an industrial scale
and listed as an ingredient in the recipes of Apicius:

From A Taste of Ancient Rome, p. 27:

Ancient sources contain countless recipes for the preparation of garum, also
known as muria or liquamen. The most complete is provided by Gargilius
Martialis, a writer from the third century A.D.

Use fatty fish, for example sardines, and a well-sealed (pitched) container
with a 26-35 quart/liter capacity. Add dried aromatic herbs possessing a
strong flavor, such as dill, coriander, fennel, celery, mint, oregano, and
others making a layer on the bottom of the container; then put down a layer of
fish (if small leave them whole, if large use pieces); and over this add a
layer of salt two fingers high. Repeat these three layers until the container
is filled. Let it rest for seven days in the sun. Then mix the sauce daily for
twenty days. After that time it becomes a liquid (garum).

\-- Gargilius Martialis, De medicina et de virtute herbarum

From "Geoponica" (20.46.1-6), as cited by Robert I. Curtis, Garum and
Salsamenta: Production and Commerce in Materia Medica (New York: E. J. Brill,
1991):

The so-called liquamen is made in this manner: the intestines of fish are
thrown into a vessel and salted. Small fish, either the best smelt, or small
mullet, or sprats, or wolffish, or whatever is deemed to be small, are all
salted together and, shaken frequently, are fermented in the sun. After it has
been reduced in the heat, garum is obtained from it in this way: a large,
strong basket is placed into the vessel of the aforementioned fish, and the
garum streams into the basket. In this way the so-called liquamen is strained
through the basket when it is taken up. The remaining refuse is alex. The
Bithynians prepare it in this manner: It is best if you take small or large
sprats, but if not, wolffish, or horse-mackerel, or mackerel, or even alica,
and a mixture of all, and throw these into a baker's kneading trough, in which
the are accustomed to knead meal. Tossing into the modius of fish two Italian
sextarii of salt, mix up thoroughly in order to strengthen it with salt. After
leaving it alone for one night throw it into a vessel and place it without a
lid in the sun for two or three months, agitating it with a shaft at
intervals. Next take it, cover it, and store it away. Some add to one
sextarius of fish, two sextarii of old wine. Next, if you wish to use the
garum immediately, that is to say not ferment it in the sun, but to boil it,
you do it this way. When the brine has been tested, so that an egg having been
thrown in floats (if it sinks, it is not sufficiently salt), and throwing the
fish into the brine in a newly-made earthenware pot and adding in some
oregano, you place it on a sufficient fire until it is boiled, that is until
it begins to reduce a little. Some throw in boiled-down must. Next, throwing
the cooled liquid into a filter you toss it a second, and a third time through
the filter until it turns out clear. After having covered it, store it away.
The best garum, the so-called haimation, is made in this way: the intestines
of tunny along with the gills, juice and blood are taken and sufficient salt
is sprinkled on. After having left it alone in the vessel for two months at
most, pierce the vessel and the garum, called haimation, is withdrawn.

------
abrowne
As some of the skeptics in the article say, we can't be sure there's no link,
but there doesn't need to be a link to explain having similar sauces in the
two regions. If you have fish, salt, sun and a lack of refrigeration, you are
going to have fermented fish soon enough.

~~~
kleer001
Just as there are bagpipes in Scotland and Arabia doesn't mean they did or did
not have cultural exchange. It might only mean they both had goats, curiosity,
lots of time on their hands, and a semi-musical inclination.

~~~
newacct583
> It might only mean they both had goats,

Goats themselves, however, are absolutely something they got by trade and
exchange. All three known domestication events happened in the middle east.

~~~
kleer001
Then it's likely word of the instruments went along with them!

People tend to love to share knowledge and meat.

------
aaron695
I'm confused. They don't seem to be talking about prahok or mam nem.

These seem far more likely to be imported or have a complex history since they
are fking disgusting but very popular. Unlike fish sauce which seems pretty
meh.

I remember eating dog in a restaurant in Vietnam, which is very expensive and
mostly done for health occasionally by locals and they had it with what I
think was mam nem because it's a special meal and I had to check if there was
an open sewer, I hoped up and went to the window and searched the room to find
the smell.

------
flatfilefan
Samurai and Samariter, Magadan and Maria Magdalena, are they related as well?

------
mesozoic
It was just fish when they started the shipment, rotted on the way. Hey why
not eat it anyway?

------
draw_down
It is kind of strange to link it with Rome over China. Occam's razor and all
that.

But, I thought the production and end product of garum were not known today?
We know how much Romans loved it, but I thought nobody knew exactly how it was
made or its texture, etc.

One thing that stuck out to me:

> _the flavoursome dip was the second most expensive liquid on the market
> after perfumes, and is said to have had an unexpectedly pleasant smell. It
> developed a nasty smell only after it had become foul_

As much as I love eating things flavored with fish sauce, its smell is...
rank. It smells terrible, but it tastes great.

~~~
eindiran
There are surviving garum recipes from the Geoponica - see page 329 here:
[https://archive.org/details/Geoponica02](https://archive.org/details/Geoponica02)

------
thrwyoilarticle
>Nuoc mam

If you're going to ignore the way it's actually spelled, why not just use the
translation anyway? The way English speakers (like me) treat other countries'
alphabets is bizarre.

~~~
eindiran
Are you referring to the missing diacritical marks? (nước mắm)

"Nuoc mam" is much less ambiguous than using "fish sauce", so using the
translation seems like a lot of precision is lost. Plus, "nuoc mam" is the
standard romanization of "nước mắm", which is admittedly difficult to type on
QWERTY keyboards + en-* locales.

If you're talking about "nước chấm", as far as I know that is a class of
dipping sauces that include things besides just "nước mắm"[0].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_sauce#Vietnam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_sauce#Vietnam)

~~~
thrwyoilarticle
The whole language is already a romanization. If the diacritics didn't contain
useful information, they wouldn't exist. I can understand writing without
diacritics when writing informally - even Vietnamese people do that - but in
something published I would hope they'd go through the effort of committing to
the English or the Vietnamese name. Nuoc mam is neither, it's a placeholder
that says "we don't want to sound low-market by saying 'Vietnamese fish
sauce', but we also don't care about being correct". It's not like Chinese
characters, where it needs to be romanized for English speakers to recognise
it: if we see nước mắm in sequential sentences, we'll know it's talking about
the same thing even if we don't remember the diacritics.

These will be things from SMCP's style guide and will be shared by many other
publications, because it's the way most of us treat other languages. There's a
similar treatement of name order. I think the style shows disregard for the
languages and cultures, so I don't like it.

~~~
eindiran
The additional information contained in the diacritics is essentially useless
to English speakers: they certainly aren't going to get the tones right and
the dipthong "ướ" has no equivalent sound in English. Vietnamese speakers
themselves frequently elide diacritics as you point out, so you aren't really
hurting anyone's comprehension.

Diacritics are pretty rare in English publications for the most part: most
drop diacritics even off of the English words that technically should have
them: cliché, crêpe, façade, piñata, protégé, résumé, risqué... Even the _New
Yorker_ , with its famously persnickety style guide, drops the tone diacritics
from Vietnamese dish names:
[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/27/van-das-
tour-o...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/27/van-das-tour-of-
vietnamese-delicacies)

Outside of this, I think the point about "nuoc mam" being the standard
(complete) romanization still stands: it is common enough that some common
English dictionaries have added it (eg [https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/nuoc%20mam](https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/nuoc%20mam) and
[https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/nuoc-
ma...](https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/nuoc-mam)). This
is quite a common occurrence in languages which use the Latin alphabet +
additional letters: most speakers of German are used to seeing "ß" become "ss"
in English publications. I can see why you interpret this as a disregard for
other languages, but people are more likely to try to say these words if they
think the word is easily pronounceable. And using the word makes the foods,
places, names, etc of other cultures more likely to be shared and become a
part of the common parlance; I'd go so far as to say that having an anglicized
form of a name means that it is much more likely to become a common thing in
the Anglophone world, which breeds greater appreciation of other cultures.

~~~
freddie_mercury
> The additional information contained in the diacritics is essentially
> useless to English speakers

This is a plausible sounding line of thought but English-language sources are
rarely consistent about it. In particular, Western European languages,
especially French, often get to keep their accents even though they are
meaningless to English speakers.

Compare, for instance, how many places will write "Côte de bœuf" but "nuoc
mam". German, Spanish, Portugese, and Swedish are other languages where I
often see "weird letters" and diacritics left in, even in English-language
publications that don't do the same favors for other languages.

That said, it is possible that SCMP is consistent about this so I don't want
to call them out as hypocritical without checking.

~~~
wonderlg
I guess I’ll be calling it the Uait Aus in Uoscinton because in my language
“sh” is unreadable and contains no extra information.

Some words have been imported and adapted into English in the past, but I
doubt that nước mắm is one of them.

I‘d also say that news outlets should be held to a higher standard than
“conversational language.”

~~~
fiblye
I mean, that's normal. "Germany" isn't what the so-called "Germans" call their
country. And if we're being pedantic, referring to the country as "Vietnam" is
absolutely wrong. It's "Việt Nam".

But of course, this is all BS. Languages constantly borrow new words. 20 years
ago, nobody knew what "pho" or "banh mi" were, but now we all do. We know what
it means _so much_ that we leave off the diacritics entirely and nobody is
confused. Those diacritics cannot be represented within the framework of
English. They're components of a completely different language.

Is it unreasonable that English speakers today will borrow the word "nuoc mam"
and use it in normal English conversation? I've already been seeing it on
recipe sites for a couple years now. It's about as English as kimchi and
ramen. Nobody ever has or ever will look up the hangul or katakana to write
about those in an English article, despite them being easy to remember. "nước
mắm" is a foreign word written in its language. "Nuoc mam" is the thoroughly
transliterated, romanized equivalent. This phenomenon exists in every language
on earth that has ever come in contact with another culture. There isn't a
higher standard to hold the author to--they're writing how humans do.

~~~
JCharante
I think it's a bit disingenuous to compare the Hangul of kimchi to the writing
of nước mắm when Vietnamese is already in latin script. Of course the
diacritics aren't going to convey much knowledge to non-speakers besides "this
is not pronounced how you're probably going to think it's pronounced" but in a
world of Unicode it doesn't seem like it requires much extra effort. Maybe I
can relate because everytime I look at my ID, I don't see my name, just a
bastardization of it.

It should also be noted that most Vietnamese people don't really care about
texting without diacritics. Most text messages are written without diacritics
in order to minimize the payload size. It's just about perception when you see
foreign western dishes with their diacritics like crème brûlée but see foreign
eastern dishes without theirs.

