My father was an exacting eater and suspicious of certain ingredients. (Cilantro above all he despised.) But I don’t think he ever inspected the label on that Lea & Perrins bottle, which would have revealed to him the presence of fermented glutamate-rich anchovies, a food that in no other form was allowed to cross the threshold of our house. My mother, having grown up in the Philippines, was more at ease with the concept of tiny, oily fish packed in salt and left to slowly decompose (the high concentration of salt inhibits the growth of harmful bacteria) until they yield their liquid essence, which is used both in cooking and as a condiment, lending a note thrillingly close to rot, of dank earth and the deepest sea.
In Tagalog, this is patis, cousin to nuoc mam in Vietnam and nam pla in Thailand. In the West, it is simply “fish sauce,” and often regarded as an Eastern tradition. But the ancient Romans had their own versions, garum and liquamen (which may have been synonyms or distinct types or one a subclass of the other; scholars differ). Liquamen appears in almost every recipe of Apicius’ “De Re Coquinaria,” attributed to the first century A.D. and the only extant cookbook from that era. To Pliny the Elder, garum was a liquid “of a very exquisite nature,” whose cost rivaled that of perfume. To the Stoic philosopher Seneca, it was a dangerous indulgence that could corrupt one’s insides, both physical and spiritual — but then again, he frowned on oysters too.
No one knows quite why garum fell out of favor. Maybe it was the high taxes on salt to fund Roman wars toward the end of the empire, or the increasing brazenness of pirates, disrupting the lives of fishermen. Maybe the Visigoths and the Vandals just didn’t like the scent, which the poet Martial described as “putrid.” A gap opens in history. Then, sometime in the Middle Ages (or so legend has it), monks near the village of Cetara on Italy’s Amalfi Coast, tasked with preserving the local catch of anchovies, discovered the pleasures of the amber liquid exuded by the fish as it aged.
For centuries, this remained something of a regional secret. The villagers made colatura di alici (literally “anchovy drippings”) in old wine barrels in their cellars and gave small bottles to their neighbors for Christmas. Only in recent decades has colatura reached a broader audience. I tasted it for the first time in Milan last summer. I was in the city for less than 24 hours and for my one dinner chose Trippa, a trattoria at once unassuming and wildly acclaimed. (When I told the haughty manager at our hotel that we had a reservation there, he looked at me differently, as if I had risen in his esteem.)
I ordered a plate of spaghettini with colatura and bottarga di muggine (cured gray mullet roe) — a marriage of two traditional dishes. “You can’t stop at classical tradition,” Diego Rossi, the chef, told me. “You have to invent new dishes, to make a new tradition.” The taste was insistent yet oddly delicate, and powerfully marine. The waiter said that the recipe was simple: “Boil the pasta. Not too much. Season it with olive oil, bottarga — grate it fine, like cheese — and colatura.”
