In the early 2000s, post-dotcom-crash I worked at small consultancy for the airlines industry that had a software wing. I think I made $11/hour slinging PHP code. They had sequestered the engineers, (half a dozen of us, all young) in the back of a large print shop (the consultancy specialized in manuals) and we had our own kitchen back there, so we sometimes cooked together.
One of my coworkers was married to a Laotian woman and as such married into a large Laotian community. One day we went to the Asian supermarket and we bought all the stuff to make green papaya salad and larb. He brought three specific things from home for this: a weird aluminum cauldron, a bamboo basket to put on it (to make sticky rice) and a repurposed instant coffee bottle full of the strangest looking sludge. It looked kind of like peering into a chewing tobacco spit bottle. This was a bottle of homemade padaek[1] and he said it was like liquid gold in the community he lived in. It was foul as hell to smell but we did a taste test of the papaya salad before and after mixing it in and sure enough it was so much better with the padaek. It was an eye opening experience and since then I've always had a fish sauce bottle in my fridge. I even use a little of it in things like spaghetti sauce.
Anyway if you have a chance to get your hands on a little homemade padaek, definitely do it. Would kill for some, myself. Also, share new foods with friends if they are open to it. I am very fond of that memory. I had never been exposed to those dishes before and even that small experience broadened my world in a simple, but meaningful way.
Sounds like what they call "bla ra" in Thailand (Northeastern Thailand has a lot of Laotian influence). Thick/chunky, unlike the more refined "fish sauce" - "nam bla".
Lived in a house for a while with neighbors making it - slow fermenting pots of fish. Not a pleasant olfactory experience.
I had a nice Thai Omelet once in a restaurant and then looked up the recipe. Now I always add a bit of fiah sauce into my eggs, with chopped garlic and some soy sauce and a bit of water so it gets fluffy in the hot oil. Never thought fish in omelet would work but it's quite tasty!
If people put anchovy in their bolognese, I can imagine fish sauce is a great and easy substitute. Never thought of that, but will try next time it's on the menu :)
I usually have a tube of anchovy paste in the fridge for whenever I make Caesar salad, but in the rare times that I don't I just use fish sauce in the dressing instead and it works surprisingly well.
Yeah, my wife is Cambodian and she buys the Lao stuff because she knows people who make it without chemicals.
The Cambodian version is Prahok and apparently it's usually raw and you aren't supposed to eat it raw, but I ate it raw (it was pink colored) for a couple days before someone told me. Prahok sounds gross but the stinky flavor is really reminiscent of cheese.
When I was traveling to Raleigh NC semi-regularly I liked going to a really good Laotian restaurant there. One of my favorite places to eat (along with Beasley's for their fried chicken).
I don't think many people are confused on the sentience of fish... nor that telling people this would get them to stop eating fish anyways. It's a pretty important source of protein for much of the world.
> One such food historian, Sally Grainger, notes in her 2021 book The Story of Garum: Fermented Fish Sauce and Salted Fish in the Ancient World that despite discussions of Roman fish sauce in many publications, Roman fish sauce is not actually Roman at all: it’s Greek.
this seems to be a trope. Mark Kurlansky (who is cited later in this fantastic article!) wrote an excellent book called “Cheesecake” whose central plot line concerns a bakery trying to make Cato’s cheesecake, an ancient Roman cheesecake recipe that is often recognized as the “first” cheesecake for whom a recipe was published. Except the bakery/restaurant is Greek, and the owners, who are also Greeks, are convinced that the Romans stole this recipe from them.
As for the liquid gold itself: fish sauce is unbelievable. Elevates dishes as much as its smell nauseates. I was shocked to learn that fish sauce is legitimate just fish and salt!
My high school Latin classmates and I made garum and left it to ferment in my back yard for a month. Young and foolish as we were, we stored it in a plastic Tupperware container. The day I brought it back to school for the class tasting, I had it sitting on a stack of piano books in the passenger seat of my car.
Weeks later, the rotted fish stench just wouldn't fade from my book of Beethoven sonatas. I ended up throwing it away.
Oh absolutely and you're welcome! Btw, fish sauce in scrambled eggs over rice is one of the simplest, most satisfying meals you'll find across Southeast Asia, in my country Vietnam especially. It's my favorite meal also.
Okay I know we're not supposed to complain about downvotes but c'mon it's actually delicious, doesn't taste like fish, and just adds umami. Don't knock it until you try it!
I'm just down voting a meaningless comment. 1T fish sauce + an unknown amount of tomato sauce could taste like anything from fish sauce to tomato sauce.
I didn’t downvote you but fish sauce does taste strongly like rancid fish to some people, even in trace quantities. Nothing about that flavor profile is delicious. There is nothing stealthy about it either if you are one of those people; you can immediately detect that disgusting note on the first bite.
I love anchovies and use a lot of them in many of the dishes I cook (including tomato sauce). Fish sauce ruins everything it touches for me. It isn’t lack of exposure either; I lived on Vietnamese home-cooking for many years. I eat a lot of weird and pungent things but I have no context for why anyone would want to put that fish sauce in their food. Also, some types of fish sauce from around the world don’t have this effect for whatever reason.
I’m pretty sure from observation that it is gene-linked thing, like the cilantro sensitivity. While rare, even some Vietnamese people seem to fall into this set and it is part of their cuisine.
At least in the US, fish in general is somewhat polarizing and, probably especially, strong tasting fish like anchovies, fish sauce, etc. Just not something probably the majority of people grew up with.
I bought a bottle of Vietnamese fish sauce (Red Boat brand, the most recommended brand) and added a teaspoon to some pea leaves. I loved the resulting flavor, but my partner did not and complained that it had too much of a fishy smell. A lot of cooking techniques actually seek to remove this fishy smell even when cooking fish, so it was not welcome to add this to something that didn’t contain fish in the first place. It’s certainly not a flavor everyone would like.
So the West still does have a fish sauce in common use, although one that's not nearly as strong as the eastern variants. Worcestershire sauce was an attempt to recreate an Indian fish sauce, and to this day contains anchovies.
Colatura di Alici is fish sauce made from anchovies in the same Roman town since the Roman republic. It was used by everyone on everything and also traveled with soldiers across Europe during the empire. It's nice - it tastes "softer" than the Asian fish sauces.
I also buy from Italians at a farmers market here in Switzerland rotten anchovies packed in salt and ground peppercorns. Stinks but when you add one to pasta sauce you're making the smell disappears and tons of glutamates are added.
> One such food historian, Sally Grainger, notes in her 2021 book The Story of Garum: Fermented Fish Sauce and Salted Fish in the Ancient World that despite discussions of Roman fish sauce in many publications, Roman fish sauce is not actually Roman at all: it’s Greek.
this seems to be a trope. Mark Kurlansky (who is cited later in this fantastic article!) wrote an excellent book called “Cheesecake” whose central plot line concerns a bakery trying to make Cato’s cheesecake, a cheesecake often recognized as the “first” cheesecake for whom a recipe was published. Except the bakery/restaurant is Greek, and the owners, who are also Greeks, are convinced that the Romans stole this recipe from them.
As for the liquid gold itself: fish sauce is unbelievable. Elevates dishes as much as its smell nauseates. I was shocked to learn that fish sauce is legitimate just fish and salt!
Fish sauce is delicious but had to stop using it since it's high in histamine (gives me a stuffy nose) and potentially carcinogenic due to its high levels of nitrosamines
A couple of years ago I planned a road trip I've yet to take, from where I live in Worcestershire, passing through Malaga where they have a glass pyramid in front of a Roman theatre that shows the basins that were used for making garum.
Wow, Legalnomads! Happy to see her pop up here. Way back in the day when I used to backpack and freelance she had a very big online presence in the internet hustler community. I just read through her recent history and I'm sad for her recent health issues, but glad she's still pushing through.
108 comments
One of my coworkers was married to a Laotian woman and as such married into a large Laotian community. One day we went to the Asian supermarket and we bought all the stuff to make green papaya salad and larb. He brought three specific things from home for this: a weird aluminum cauldron, a bamboo basket to put on it (to make sticky rice) and a repurposed instant coffee bottle full of the strangest looking sludge. It looked kind of like peering into a chewing tobacco spit bottle. This was a bottle of homemade padaek[1] and he said it was like liquid gold in the community he lived in. It was foul as hell to smell but we did a taste test of the papaya salad before and after mixing it in and sure enough it was so much better with the padaek. It was an eye opening experience and since then I've always had a fish sauce bottle in my fridge. I even use a little of it in things like spaghetti sauce.
Anyway if you have a chance to get your hands on a little homemade padaek, definitely do it. Would kill for some, myself. Also, share new foods with friends if they are open to it. I am very fond of that memory. I had never been exposed to those dishes before and even that small experience broadened my world in a simple, but meaningful way.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padaek
Lived in a house for a while with neighbors making it - slow fermenting pots of fish. Not a pleasant olfactory experience.
The Cambodian version is Prahok and apparently it's usually raw and you aren't supposed to eat it raw, but I ate it raw (it was pink colored) for a couple days before someone told me. Prahok sounds gross but the stinky flavor is really reminiscent of cheese.
And don't let them smell the raw shrimp paste.
It's pretty simple to make.
> One such food historian, Sally Grainger, notes in her 2021 book The Story of Garum: Fermented Fish Sauce and Salted Fish in the Ancient World that despite discussions of Roman fish sauce in many publications, Roman fish sauce is not actually Roman at all: it’s Greek.
this seems to be a trope. Mark Kurlansky (who is cited later in this fantastic article!) wrote an excellent book called “Cheesecake” whose central plot line concerns a bakery trying to make Cato’s cheesecake, an ancient Roman cheesecake recipe that is often recognized as the “first” cheesecake for whom a recipe was published. Except the bakery/restaurant is Greek, and the owners, who are also Greeks, are convinced that the Romans stole this recipe from them.
As for the liquid gold itself: fish sauce is unbelievable. Elevates dishes as much as its smell nauseates. I was shocked to learn that fish sauce is legitimate just fish and salt!
Weeks later, the rotted fish stench just wouldn't fade from my book of Beethoven sonatas. I ended up throwing it away.
One thing I am “stealing” from SEA is fish sauce in scrambled eggs. Feels almost like a cheat code.
> One thing I am “stealing” from SEA is fish sauce in scrambled eggs. Feels almost like a cheat code.
A bit of stone ground mustard added to scrambled eggs is another culinary delight.
> What if my mustard is made without stones. Will it still work?
It depends on your risk tolerance to try I suppose. It will either be a delicious variant or create a space-time singularity dooming us all...
:-D
I love anchovies and use a lot of them in many of the dishes I cook (including tomato sauce). Fish sauce ruins everything it touches for me. It isn’t lack of exposure either; I lived on Vietnamese home-cooking for many years. I eat a lot of weird and pungent things but I have no context for why anyone would want to put that fish sauce in their food. Also, some types of fish sauce from around the world don’t have this effect for whatever reason.
I’m pretty sure from observation that it is gene-linked thing, like the cilantro sensitivity. While rare, even some Vietnamese people seem to fall into this set and it is part of their cuisine.
I also buy from Italians at a farmers market here in Switzerland rotten anchovies packed in salt and ground peppercorns. Stinks but when you add one to pasta sauce you're making the smell disappears and tons of glutamates are added.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0q5QhGnEKUM
Addendum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvF2m57_Usg
> One such food historian, Sally Grainger, notes in her 2021 book The Story of Garum: Fermented Fish Sauce and Salted Fish in the Ancient World that despite discussions of Roman fish sauce in many publications, Roman fish sauce is not actually Roman at all: it’s Greek.
this seems to be a trope. Mark Kurlansky (who is cited later in this fantastic article!) wrote an excellent book called “Cheesecake” whose central plot line concerns a bakery trying to make Cato’s cheesecake, a cheesecake often recognized as the “first” cheesecake for whom a recipe was published. Except the bakery/restaurant is Greek, and the owners, who are also Greeks, are convinced that the Romans stole this recipe from them.
As for the liquid gold itself: fish sauce is unbelievable. Elevates dishes as much as its smell nauseates. I was shocked to learn that fish sauce is legitimate just fish and salt!
Worcestershire sauce is a descendent of garum.
I highly recommend avoiding going anywhere near them.
I'm told if you want a sense of it, add knobs of soft blue cheese to your cuscous.