Love it or loathe it – the umami flavour of anchovy

We are blessed to be living in a golden age of anchovies. They’re everywhere – lacing salads, festooning pizzas, draped across inordinately expensive small plates. In certain circles, there are few more potent social signifiers than the red, yellow and blue of an Ortiz tin. Victory for the umami junkies.

How times change. Today the average Spaniard puts away 2.69 kilos of the things each year, but it was a different story in the 16th century, when the Catalan chef Ruperto de Nola complained that anchovies were ‘commonly bitter’. A little later, the English physician Tobias Venner fumed that they ‘do nourish nothing at all, but a naughty cholerick blood’.

These denunciations are quoted by Christopher Beckman, an archaeological researcher and former horror-film producer, in his sweeping, data-laden study of the anchovy’s mixed fortunes in the western world. Though ‘highly valued as a flavour enhancer’ in their various forms – salted, pickled, tinned in oil – they have also been routinely traduced as a ‘worthless little fish’.

It isn’t news that foods go in and out of fashion. Think of Dr Johnson trundling to the market in Georgian London to buy dirt-cheap oysters for his cat. But Beckman argues, convincingly, that anchovies are a special case. Over six chunky chapters, each focusing on a particular country (or empire), he shows how their shifting status has reflected wider changes in food, culture, trade and even medicine.

We begin in ancient Rome, with garum. Although recipes varied for this fermented fish sauce (funky enough that it could still be smelt on amphorae retrieved from Pompeii), it’s clear that anchovies were often part of the mix. Garum was big business, with factories churning it out across the empire, and it straddled the social classes. For the poet Martial, it was a guilty pleasure, both ‘noble’ and ‘putrid’.