A Brief History of Fish Sauce

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something twisting and turning, rhythmic and precise. It was only when I was directly in front of the Saigon street stall that I realized what was unfolding: the owner, a smiling man in his 40s who always greeted me as I walked by, was packaging nuoc cham, a condiment made from fish sauce, water, lime juice, and sugar. He was also adding thin slivers of pickled carrots to the tiny bags that piled in front of him.

What he was doing happens all over the city at street stalls and restaurants. Nuoc mam (pure fish sauce) is consumed by 95% of Vietnamese households. It’s also used to make nuoc cham, a dipping condiment of fish sauce, water, lime juice, and sugar that accompanies many Southern Vietnamese dishes.

A History of Fish Sauce

In my travels, I’ve heard others cite fish sauce as one of those tastes that takes some getting used to for Western palates, along with stinky tofu and durian fruit, and the bright purple fermented shrimp paste that accompanies Vietnamese bun rieu soup. Its lingering smell leaves no mystery about its strong, fishy contents.

Used in Thailand as nam pla and Myanmar as ngan bya yay, as well as Laos, Cambodia, and the Philippines under other local names and variations, one thing is certain regardless of preference: fish sauce plays a crucial role in flavouring food in Southeast Asia.

It has become my first ingredient of choice in a new city, something I use in homemade soups and curries, chicken marinates and salads, and even omelettes, adding a taste of Vietnam to my meal. To my taste buds, it is as evocative of my years in Southeast Asia as lime, garlic and chilies.

“This is more than just a condiment,” founder of Red Boat Fish Sauce, Cuong Pham, has said. “It’s so good, it’s like gold.”

In its purest form, fish sauce is made from just two ingredients: fish and salt, fermented together for months. Despite the fact that some fish sauce labels depict squid, shrimp, or even a man carrying a giant shrimp over his shoulder (my favourite, for obvious reasons), the base formula remains the same. Both fish and salt are placed into huge vats, usually three parts fish to one part salt, and weighted down to prevent the fish from floating to the surface as fermentation begins. Once liquid begins to seep out of the fish, it is drained and reintroduced to the vat for the full fermentation process, which lasts long enough for it to reach concentration, but not so long that off-flavours develop. Usually this process takes nine months to a year, with the vats sitting in the sun as the sauce takes form.

Fish Sauce in Ancient Times

The earliest origins of fish sauce go back further than most people realize, and its actual beginnings is remarkably hard to pinpoint even in 2026.

Did fermenting fish begin as a tradition in China or Vietnam? Or as some suggest in Ancient Rome? Historians remain divided on the topic.

One such food historian, Sally Grainger, notes in her 2021 book The Story of Garum: Fermented Fish Sauce and Salted Fish in the Ancient World that despite discussions of Roman fish sauce in many publications, Roman fish sauce is not actually Roman at all: it’s Greek. Per her writing, the first recorded fish sauce was produced by the ancient Greeks along the coastline of the Black Sea, where the abundant fishery resources of the region may have been a significant factor in Greek colonisation of the area as early as the 7th century BCE.

The sauce was called gàros in Greek, and when the Romans adopted it, they transliterated the name as garum. Importantly, though, the word garum came to mean something quite specific and different from the everyday condiment most Romans actually used. Many pieces, including earlier versions of this post, conflates the true history. As Grainger explains in her book, liquamen is the standard fish sauce, made by dissolving whole small fish, often anchovies, layered with salt in a barrel or pit and left to ferment for up to four months. In contrast, garum (proper garum, not the garum that’s used interchangeably to describe ‘ancient’ fish sauce) is thicker and darker, and made from fermented fish blood and viscera. It has a distinctively dark colour and iron-rich taste. It may seem pedantic to differentiate here, but I always say words matter, and my earlier version of this post got it wrong.

The Romans actually had a whole vocabulary for fermented fish products: garum, liquamen, allec, and muria each described distinct preparations. When we compare ancient Roman fish sauce to modern* nuoc mam* or nam pla, we are really talking about liquamen and not garum.

Roman fish sauce was used across a vast geographic and culinary range. The recipes in Apicius’s cookbook De Re Coquinaria, which is available for free online, give a sense of how fundamental it was to Roman cooking: fish sauce was the ingredient that brought dishes together, and it was often used instead of salt. Pompeii was famous in ancient times for its production, and the many mentions in ancient texts and cookbooks imply a very normal, common use across the Mediterranean world. Per Sally Grainger, who in addition to her book has also created reconstructions of ancient Roman sauces, has singled out Red Boat Fish Sauce as the closest thing currently available on the market to Roman liquamen.

In a landmark 2025 study published in the journal Antiquity, scientists recovered and sequenced ancient DNA from fish bone remains at the bottom of a Roman salting vat at the Adro Vello site in northwestern Spain that was thought to be a fish-processing plant, active from the first through third centuries AD. The team successfully extracted and sequenced DNA from the small bone remains and confirmed that the primary ingredient was European sardine (Sardina pilchardus). By comparing the ancient DNA with that of modern sardines, the team found the populations of this fish during Roman times were genetically similar to those currently found in the same region, which is astounding to think about. That’s 2000 years of biological continuity!

The geographic footprint of the Roman fish sauce industry was vast. Other fish-processing ‘factories’ have been excavated in Spain, Portugal, and Northern Africa, as well as more recent discoveries near Ashkelon in Israel and at the Nabeul site in Tunisia (the ancient city of Neapolis), uncovered by a 2013 storm. In modern day cuisine, fish sauce is almost completely absent from Italian food with the exception of colatura di alici, a fish sauce still made in factories in the village of Cetara in Italy’s Salerno region.

In his piece about fish sauce in the ancient world, Declan Henesy notes:

The Carthaginians were also early makers and traders of fish sauce, producing it along the coast of the Lake of Tunis, in modern day Tunisia. A Punic shipwreck from 5th century BCE, found off the coast of Ibiza, may have been carrying a cargo of fish sauce stored in amphorae made in Gades (modern day Spain) and Tingi (modern-day Morocco). There are many early Graeco-Roman literary references to fish sauce, from writers such as Aristophanes, Sophocles and Aeschylus.

There also are literary references to the sauce from writers including Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Aeschylus, confirming its place in daily ancient life long before Rome’s domination of the region.

The decline of fish sauce in the post-Roman era had several causes, of which salt scarcity and piracy are the most commonly cited. That’s not the whole story, though. The heavy salt taxes that followed the collapse of Roman administrative infrastructure also drove up the cost of producing fish sauce, and without Roman naval protection of the Mediterranean coasts, piracy disrupted the trade routes along which both salt and finished fish sauce had flowed. As a result, production ground to a stop across much of the region.