Anchovies Are Always a Good Idea
To understand anchovies, you need to understand umami.
For most of history, just four tastes were recognized: sweet, sour, bitter and salty. They were probably singled out around the fifth century B.C.E. by the Greek philosopher Democritus. The mantra of four tastes was repeated — with a few notable exceptions — until a Japanese chemist named Kikunae Ikeda posited in the early 1900s that there might be an unidentified fifth.
Mr. Ikeda had noticed that seemingly unrelated foods such as asparagus, tomatoes, cheese, cooked meats and dashi, a traditional broth in Japanese cuisine made from kombu seaweed and dried fish flakes, had something in common that did not align with any of the four recognized tastes. He set about analyzing kombu to tease out the chemical foundation of this unique flavor. After months of painstaking chemical reductions, the seaweed yielded the source — a tiny amount of glutamate, which exploded with flavor when combined with sodium and sprinkled on food. He named the taste umami, after the Japanese word “umai,” which translates — very roughly — as savory taste.
Preserved anchovies — whether salted, packed in oil or transformed into fish sauce — have extraordinarily high levels of umami. Adding even half an anchovy or a small splash of fish sauce to an otherwise simple dish can turbocharge it to a new realm of flavor. Despite this ability, in some Western cultures anchovies are notoriously polarizing. (No such divide seems to exist in many parts of Asia, however, where they are regularly consumed fresh, dried or in fish sauce.)
But it’s time for the leery to give anchovies another chance. These are times in which we’re rethinking how we eat. We know that red meat and animal fats are hard on our bodies and the planet. We know we need to be eating more whole foods, more plants, more good fats, more grains and pulses. The beauty of the anchovy is that it’s a small, fast-growing fish that can be sustainably caught, is good for us and is very good at making other things that are good for us taste great. We know that because it’s been doing so for millenniums: It enlivened lamb and black-eyed peas in ancient Rome, spiked the sauces of French haute cuisine and had a starring role in hors d’oeuvres at fancy New York restaurants.
The ancient Romans were the first in Europe to harvest and consume anchovies and other small fish on an industrial scale. Across their empire, the pungent fish sauce garum— often made with anchovies — was consumed in large quantities. So distinctive is the aroma of garum that during the 1960s in the ancient city of Pompeii, excavators unearthed 2,000-year-old containers that they said still exuded the smell.
Even if the Romans had no recognized concept of umami, they understood that fish sauce made their food taste better. Much better. In the ancient Roman recipe compendium known as “Apicius” and considered to be the world’s oldest surviving cookbook, some 350 of more than 400 recipes use fish sauce. They include one for lentils, an ancient Roman staple, which suggests also adding leek, cilantro, mint, honey and wine.
