Thursday, October 15, 2009
Chex Mix and Fermented Fish Sauce
Students of the history of the Roman Empire fairly early on find out that the Romans particularly liked to use a condiment called garum, which was a fermented fish sauce. The usual response to hearing this is some combination of disgust, horror, and amazement. (That was certainly my response.)
But now I’ve just read this article about the history of ketchup, written by a linguistics professor from Stanford named Dan Jurafsky, on The Language of Food. It turns out that ketchup originally contained no tomatoes, but was rather a fermented fish sauce imported from SE Asia that gradually changed its ingredient set until it’s what we eat now.
But what, you say*, does this have to do with Chex Mix?
Well, it turns out that Worcestershire sauce, one of the primary flavoring ingredients in Chex Mix, is made from fermented anchovies**. That is, it was one of the originally imported types of ketchup. (The recipe was probably imported from South or South East Asia by a British military officer, though the history is a bit muddled.)
Mmm, fermented fish sauce.
* Say it!
** There are non-fish Worcestershire sauces, but it is my understanding that the original recipe includes fermented fish. That is certainly the case with Lea and Perrin’s.
Comments & Trackbacks
You do know that it’s very easy to make your own Chex Mix. Melt butter or margarine, add worcestershire and whatever other seasonings you like, and use it to flavor your own mix of cereals, nuts, pretzels, etc. My mom used to do this, and I don’t recall how you get the sauce to evenly coat all the snack stuff. Teh Google has many suggestions.
I love Lea & Perrins. I don’t care if it’s made from mashed dingo kidneys! I love it!!!
I agree with Robert.
Nothing else is quite as good as Lea & Perrins.
Growing up, it made a whole bunch of bad meals palatable for this picky kid.
I used to like to use it when making scrambled eggs, too.
Hey, you know what L&P is great on? A steak. A steak, like I’d get at one of Denver’s many fine steakhouse/bar/restaurants. The kind of place I’d be if there were, say, a Blogger Bash. Huh. I wonder if that’ll ever happen again?
I had a whole lecture on garum at univercity! So fascinating. I also watched a prominent chef try and recreate garum on his tv show ‘Dining with the Romans’. It’s possible to do as the Roman civilisation loved to document their goings on and so even recipe books survive to this day.
As for Worcestershire sauce, I love it, but when I was dating a vegeterain I experimented with the fish free option, but it was pretty disguting if I don’t say so myself! Looks like the fish adds a lot of flavour!
The way the Romans made the sauce is precisely how the Vietnamese make it. Put a fish on a plank that has curled up on the sides and let the light brown stuff from the decomposition of the fish drain down the warped plank into a bottle or jar. Cap the jar when the fish is no longer oozing. Enjoy.
You say that like it’s a bad thing, Roger.
Mmm, decomp sauce; there’s nothing like it.
Actually the fermented fish sauce is called patis here in the Philippines. Also the fermented fish paste is quite a good flavoring too.
Ron Of Filipino Recipes