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There are few foods as polarizing as the anchovy. In his book A Twist in the Tail: How the Humble Anchovy Flavored Western Cuisine , horror film producer turned food historian Christopher Beckman chronicles the tiny fish's place in the European canon and champions the umami bomb's revival.
Evan Kleiman: I'd love to know how you landed on the anchovy as the subject for your first book. Is it because so many people look upon it with horror?
Christopher Beckman: Well, it's a really interesting question. I first noticed how controversial anchovies were and how people had this love or hate relationship with them when I was living in Venice Beach, California, working down at Roger Corman's studio. Occasionally, when I cooked dinner, I would throw in an anchovy filet. What I noticed is, if I didn't mention anything, everyone ate it just fine. Mostly we just wanted beer, to be honest. But if I happened to mention there was an anchovy in it, I could see one or two people politely excusing themselves. So I saw early on, there was this element in anchovies that made them very controversial.
Christopher Beckman transitioned from film production to food history. Photo by Perveen Ali.
As a cook myself, I always noticed that. So I just started never saying to people… like puttanesca sauce, for example. If I made puttanesca sauce without an anchovy, people would say, what's wrong with this sauce?
It's missing something. It's not quite coming together
Exactly. In the "all roads lead to Rome" scenario, could you explain how Romans were using anchovies? And the evidence that supports their extreme preference for the fish?
This is something that with each new excavation that's happening in Italy and around the Roman world, we're coming to appreciate more and more just how prevalent garum was in the ancient Roman diet. And garum basically was fish sauce. You can think of it as... it's very similar to a modern Asian-style fish sauce. Romans used it to season practically everything, whether it was grains, vegetables, even fruits, meat, fish.
Where the story gets kind of interesting is that traditionally, it was thought that they were using higher-end fish to make their garum but in fact, more recent archeological excavations, and particularly in the last 10 years around Pompeii, are revealing that most of the micro elements, the little bones that we're finding in these garum containers, most of them contain anchovy bones. So what we're coming to realize is that anchovies played a far greater role in Roman garum than we ever thought, and that Roman garum was seasoning much more food than we ever imagined.
Anchovies were the key ingredient in garum, a fish sauce that ancient Romans used to flavor just about everything. Photo by Alyona Yankovska/Unsplash.
One would think, why would they choose to use that as a seasoning? Could it be because salt was so expensive? But given that Rome was everywhere, and there were salt flats and salt mines throughout the Roman Empire, I don't think that's the reason.
Interestingly enough, they had plenty of salt. It was really because as the fish breaks down in the process of creating fish sauce, it releases all the glutamates, and you end up with what everyone calls an umami bomb because it's such a powerful flavor enhancer. It's a game-changer to whatever you add it to.
But interestingly enough, when the Roman Empire ended and went into its decline around 300 to 500 AD, what we start seeing is that all that salt that was being traded and moved around the empire, suddenly, all the trade distribution networks broke down. That was one of the contributing factors to why garum started to decline so dramatically, and by the Middle Ages, was pretty much done and finished.
Because the making of garum is basically the layering of fish with salt, and then it undergoes this fermentation process.
That's exactly right. Raw fish, like raw meat, is very low in glutamates. Hence, they're extremely low in umami. It takes cooking, smoking, preserving, curing, to release those glutamates and allow the umami to develop. And that's what we all respond to.
When did the French begin incorporating anchovies into haute cuisine? And how did the famed humanist Francois Rabelais have a hand in their increased popularity?
That's a really interesting story. The French had been using, in haute cuisine, anchovies since about the 1300s but really it kicked off in 1651 with the publication of François La Varrene's Cookery book . What he did in this cookery book is he basically combined butter with anchovies, a little chive, maybe a little lemon peel, and would create a sauce. That was really what kicked open the doors to French haute cuisine and anchovies playing this major, major, major role as a flavor enhancer in the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s.
Rabelais comes into the equation because he was one of the first to really champion these obscure ingredients in France. Rabelais would talk about things like very common smoked foods that people weren't really eating, and he only mentions anchovy once in one of his books, but it's very significant in that it's one of the earliest mentions of anchovies being part of what were traditionally thought of as lower class foodstuffs being elevated up.
Anchovies bring a dose of umami to many dishes. Photo by Chris Curry/Unsplash.
Could you explain who Carême was and his role in the starting of anchovies waning in French cuisine?
Carême , as you mentioned, is one of these iconic figures in French food. Along with Escoffier, they're so iconic, they only need one name. Carême set about reorganizing French food because it still had a lot of vestiges of medieval spicing. So in the early 1800s, he basically reorganized, stripped out a lot of those medieval spices, and then he created his mother sauces, which we've all heard of — bechamel and the various espagnole sauces. These became the key way that he was delivering umami.
Because to make these mother sauces, you would reduce meat for hours. Huge amounts of meat would go into making a pint of sauce. Pounds and pounds would get reduced down all day long, and he would end up with these very umami, rich sauces. But unfortunately, one of the things he did when he was stripping out those medieval spices is he stripped out anchovies as well. So even though he's this very iconic figure in French haute cuisine, I have very ambivalent feelings about him because I feel that it lost something when he stripped anchovies out of the equation.
Spaniards are the top consumers of anchovies in the modern world. They're probably one of the top producers of anchovies as well. But the fish weren't recognized or appreciated in the northern part of the country for a long time, even though they flourished in those waters. What accounted for Spain's early disdain for the fish? And when did the tide turn?
The Spanish, as I always call it, is this conundrum, because, as you mentioned, anchovies flourish in the water surrounding Spain. Yet, very early on, and Roberto de Nola is one of the... I think it's the second or third cookbook, he writes quite disdainfully of the anchovy, and even calls it bitter. Basically, from the publication of his book, there was not another anchovy mentioned in a Spanish cookbook for 225 years, which is just astounding.
I think the best way to explain that is [that] the Spanish approach during this period was extremely hierarchical. How they looked at different food was all based on a very strict hierarchy. Anchovy, sadly, being the smallest, the boniest, the oiliest, fell at the very bottom of the hierarchy, so elites wouldn't touch them. That kind of elite disdain trickled down to the extent that most Spaniards wouldn't really eat anchovies, and when anchovies were caught in their waters, a lot of them were, interestingly enough, exported to Italy or France.
What turned all this around started very, very late in the game, in the 20th century. Up until that point, the Spanish really didn't eat [anchovies], other than, as you mentioned, in the south, where they developed a deep-fried anchovy through a Muslim conquest. But in the north, it wasn't until really post-World War II, where the Spaniards really embraced anchovies wholeheartedly.
It was due to a number of factors that played in but a lot of it had to do with the fact that the Spaniards were basically on the verge of starvation for over three decades because they were cut out of the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe. So they had to eat things they wouldn't normally, traditionally have eaten, and anchovies were one of those fish. Then, you add in things like Franco's policies, where there wasn't much work, so people were often working two or three jobs. They would go to a taberna. Cafe owners liked having anchovies, a salty anchovy, because if you ate a salty anchovy, you're far more likely to have another glass of wine or a beer.
Anchovies flourish in the waters off Northern Spain but for a long time, these fish weren't a part of Spanish cuisine. Photo by Diane Helentjaris/Unsplash.
I'm gonna have to go eat some anchovies when we finish our conversation. Let's talk about Britain and the anchovy. Was its main consumption through condiments?
Well, interestingly enough, initially, through trade with the Mediterranean world, they were importing a lot of salted anchovies. One of the really delightful ways we know this is through the diaries of Samuel Pepys . Pepys is just wonderful. He wrote a series of diaries over a period of about 10 years, and they're very charming because he was somewhat of a foodie in his day in the 1600s. We see Pepys constantly popping into a tavern for a spot of beer and anchovies, [it] is one of his favorite things to do. That was pretty much how a lot of Brits ate them, unless they were aristocrats, in which case they were often employing a French chef and eating French haute cuisine.
But this all changed with the trade with the Far East, and what they found was that these various British companies were going to look for spices and porcelain. One of the things they found on the island of Java in Indonesia was that as they pulled into port, they found two unexpected items. They found arak , which was liquor and alcohol, and then they found fish sauce.
Of course, sailors are notorious for their love of booze. Also, you have to remember, they were eating very bland shipboard fare. What they were eating on these ships, for weeks at a time, was horrible. So the idea that on their return voyage they could add a little fish sauce to their gruel was this incredible flavor enhancer. So they brought back this fish sauce, which was called in the local Indonesian language, " kecap ." They brought that back to Britain, and very clever British cooks and housewives kind of reverse-engineered it and combined that with their indigenous pickling tradition, and they created what they called ketchup, which was simply a bastardization of the word "kecap," a transliteration, if you will. So those British condiments really took off and became the dominant way the British consumed anchovies for hundreds of years.
Then, of course, ketchup made its way to America, where anchovies were promptly removed, so we were left with this very, very sweet condiment. Why did the fish never take hold here in America? Is it a class issue?
It's interesting, and I researched that pretty carefully. It was a number of factors, but one of the things that I kept coming back to was, there really was around the 1800s, 1850s the abundance of America. In terms of when people went out to eat, you would get a huge piece of meat, a huge piece of fish for practically nothing. You could go to Manhattan and get a dozen oysters. There was so much. So the idea that you were going to pay for this tiny little thing that was imported from the Mediterranean world just didn't make any sense.
You mentioned American ketchup. It's interesting because Mary Randolph , who published The Virginia House-Wife , I think it was in like 1820, 1824, something like that, she listed five different kinds of ketchup. Now, that's mushroom, walnut, oyster, a couple different kinds of tomato ketchup, but not one of them contained an anchovy. That speaks volumes because those same ketchups came from the British tradition, and in the British tradition, many of those would have contained anchovies.
It makes sense that we had such a natural abundance in our own waters surrounding the country. It's interesting. What do you think accounts for the renaissance of anchovies in both professional and home kitchens these days?
One of the things I read that was very surprising, because our attitudes in the US have changed dramatically towards anchovies, and one of the best ways I know to look at this is through anchovy pizza. Anchovy pizzas were pretty universally loathed when I was growing up because the anchovies you got on top of them were just terrible. They even made a movie, I think, with Patrick Dempsey, called Loverboy , where when someone ordered an anchovy pizza, it was code for his sexual services being needed. That's how poorly they were thought of.
All this started to change and one of the earliest, really significant turning points with pizza happened with Jeremiah Tower , who I'm sure you know, from San Francisco. I guess in the early '70s, he cooked one of the first gourmet pizzas at Chez Panisse in Berkeley.
The thing is, many of those anchovy pizzas that people were buying from the fast food places, the anchovies themselves were sold in giant bulk tins. They were poorly packed with a really cheap oil. They were opened up, exposed to oxygen for months on end. So by the time that anchovy got put on a pizza, it was a pretty foul-tasting thing.
Whereas Jeremiah Tower took a really good anchovy that had been carefully tended to then soaked in decent olive oil and he made one of these early pizzas, which I guess was a huge game-changer and led to this spark, this whole pizza movement.
I'm just using pizza to talk about the larger phenomena of food change. The foodways in the restaurant scene changed starting in the early '70s. Suddenly, people were exposed to all new kinds of ways of cooking with anchovies, and it exposed them to just how delightfully and meaty and tasty they really are.
"A Twist in the Tail" by Christopher Beckman. Photo courtesy of Hurst Publishers.
I wonder if Caesar salad dressing played a role as well.
That's a good question. Interestingly enough, the Caesar salad dressing came from an Italian American who had, when he first landed, went up to Canada, ended up down in San Diego. Prohibition. Ran his French restaurant because you follow the money. He had a French restaurant in San Diego. That came to a close with Prohibition. He went across the border to Tijuana where he could serve all the Hollywood boozers.
The story goes, one night, after hours, he had four people come in. They were all starving. The only thing he had was a little romaine lettuce, whipped up and a Caesar dressing. You'll find a variation of that going back hundreds of years in Italy. So he cleverly used an anchovy to boost the umami, the flavor of that dressing. And you know, the rest is history. Everyone loves a Caesar salad. |
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