I'd make the case that fish sauces were independently developed by different cultures. I think historians are overly trying to make connections in this case.
Fish sauce is very simple. You only need two ingredients: fish and salt. Any cultures living near an ocean can independently develop some version of fish sauce.
If there's any link between Vietnam and Rome, we'd have found traces of them along the Silk Road or maritime routes.
In Vietnam, besides fish sauce, there are other sauces "mam" made from different fishes and seafoods. Vietnamese people may have developed these "mam" before they developed the current fish sauce. Their fish sauce may have come from other "mam" than Rome.
Side note: The article appears on South China Morning Post. China often sees Vietnam as barbaric, inferior. Maybe, they couldn't see how Vietnamese could invent such a good sauce. :)
Throwing shade at SCMP by alleging some kind of anti-Vietnamess bias is unwarranted: it's the best newspaper in Hong Kong and arguably one of the best in all Asia. Alas, one of the many tragedies of Hong Kong's current political situation is that the SCMP is also going to get neutered though :(
Acting like an opposing nation copied (STOLE) something important to its cultural identity is a classic nationalist talking point. Here is the exact same article with Vietnam and fish sauce cut and pasted for Japan and sushi!
That seems a bit disingenuous. While I am no expert and cannot verify if the claims in your article are true (though Wikipedia asserts the same), it is clearly different from the OP. Your link is (presumably) rooted in accepted historical fact, while the OP is speculation
Skillful propaganda uses facts to make a conclusion or conjecture that is misleading.
> Sushi is not from Japan
Some people will stop reading and share it on Facebook here
> Sushi reached China, then Japan from its origins along the Mekong River in Southeast Asia, and was later exported to the US and the rest of the world
Actually, it's from China!
Now even more people will stop reading and share it on Facebook
> The dish started out as fermented whole fish preserved with inedible salted rice
Wait, that doesn't sound like sushi to me
> However, the sushi we know today tastes and looks very different to how it did centuries ago. First of all, the rice in the original “sushi” was not intended to be eaten. Mixed with salt, it was used to preserve the fish and then thrown out.
Three paragraphs in and below the fold, the article itself admits that the dish being discussed isn't sushi. We're talking about "sushi" here!
> And sushi’s origins aren’t even Japanese, says Nobu Hong Kong executive sushi chef Kazunari Araki, who has more than 20 years of sushi-making experience.
"origins". Also, it's a Japanese guy saying it. Even Japanese ADMIT sushi is not Japanese!
> The combination of rice and fish, he explains, originated in the third century along the Mekong River in Southeast Asia, where countries such as Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia are now situated.
1,700 years ago people preserved fish in rice!
> By the 12th century, this method of fermenting fish had travelled from the Mekong to China, and then on to Japan, where it was called narezushi. However, in the 16th century, in the Edo period, Araki says, vinegar replaced salt in the preservation process, which was a major step forward in the development of sushi. It also gave birth to the name sushi – which translates to “vinegared rice”.
I'm pretty sure this means the dish that we call sushi now is Japanese. Do you think most people will have read this far down into the article?
The rest of the article is about how sushi is actually American. According to this article, sushi is from South East Asia, Chinese, and America! Does that sound like a reasonable conclusion to you?
> it's from China! [...] 1,700 years ago people preserved fish in rice!
> The rest of the article is about how sushi is actually American. According to this article, sushi is from South East Asia, Chinese, and America! Does that sound like a reasonable conclusion to you?
No, it sounds like an absurd misrepresentation of an interesting article on the history and origins of sushi from a veteran Japanese chef that, unless you're genuinely as ignorant as you're making yourself look with this post, you can't possibly be serious about.
You're trying way too hard to spin this fairly typical food article with a mildly provocative title into a propaganda piece. The text literally calls sushi Japanese multiple times, including in the first sentence of the main text. But I guess that doesn't count if we assume no one reads that far and if they do, they probably won't understand it?
China is definitely a Master now in information warfare where it can create pieces like above (with borderline subjectivity involved) and attack right at points of cultural significance of its enemies. Just because it is written in a specific style that seems very conducive for discussion does not mean there is no agenda behind it. Off course depending on the internal degree of skepticism you have your interpretations will vary. China is brilliantly using the West's own style against them in undermining its enemies, so next time there is a conversation involving a few folks in a restaurant, how someone will narrate a story that fish sauce was Roman gift to Vietnam or some other bastardized version of the story. Tbh this is what happened in most of the history.
This sushi article is an example of SCMP smearing history.
> By the 12th century, this method of fermenting fish had travelled from the Mekong to China, and then on to Japan, where it was called narezushi.
It's a substantial claim that fermented fish and rice travelled through China to Japan. Food travels very slowly. If it travelled by land, it'll morphed with local ingredients. South China has more rice based dish. North China has less rice and more wheat in their cuisines. If fermented fish and rice travelled that far through land. It'll leave lots of traces in Chinese cuisines.
It's likely that Japanese got fermented fish and rice directly from South East Asia, without going through China. Japan has been trading with SE Asia region for centuries. Hội An is a city port in Vietnam with Japanese remnants.
Fish sauce travelled from Rome to Vietnam, through China.
Sushi travelled from SE Asia to Japan, through China.
Do you have anything to back up your claims or is it just that you'd prefer China not to be involved? Because I've found multiple sources backing up the claim that China was in fact involved.
This one (https://www.businessinsider.com/the-complete-history-of-sush...) goes even further by specifically talking of Southern China as the origin and suggests that the influence of northern invaders explains why you won't find much signs of it in modern China.
I clarify my point about sushi going through China. In the Takamiya's paper, one of the links above, the author discussed the Ocean Road hypothesis. I agree with this hypothesis. It'd be difficult for the food culture to propagate through land. It'd have to pass Northern China which is not much of a rice culture. Japan likely traded with Southern China and South East Asia through sea routes.
Rice arrived to Japan thousands of years ago. At the time, Southern China is not part of present day China. The Baiyue people were good naval navigators. They probably traded with Japan and South East Asia. Saying sushi got to Japan through China is misleading. People would think that sushi travelled through China land to Japan.
I share you general thoughts on this being a stretch and feeling somewhat euro-centric. The article author, fwiw, is "a Rome-based freelance reporter".
I'd make the case that fish sauces were independently developed by different cultures.
You can but you'd be... making a wild guess basically.
Fish sauce is very simple. You only need two ingredients: fish and salt.
And most likely... skimming the rest of the article, which does not claim that the Asian societies would not have invented the "some version of fish sauce" on their own.
What the article bases its case on is the invention of a specific kind of fish sauce:
Acclaimed chef Peter Cuong Franklin, owner of Anan Restaurant and Nhau Nhau Bar in Ho Chi Minh City, believes nuoc mam “may trace its origin back to garum” given that the Vietnamese version is also made by interleaving layers of anchovies with sea salt and letting it ferment in wood or ceramic containers for about 12 months.
It's the specificity of the invention which leads merit to the idea -- along with linguistic cues -- that it may have been imported (or perhaps hybridized with an imported invention).
Not a proven case of course - but worth taking seriously.
And really as far as I could tell only the title lead people to believe otherwise. The first statement from an actual researcher says the jury is out. So it's pretty honest, clickbait has unfortunately become part of the internet.
I want to point out that "mam" does not mean sauce. Nouc means water and is applied to water-type liquids, including fish sauce. Mam means salted fish. It's salted fish water.
To be truly pedantic, "mam" means more "salted thing" than "salted fish". There are "mắm nhum" or squid mam that has nothing to do with fish. And it is overloaded in any case. Asking for "mam" to go with your main dish means asking for a mam-based sauce.
I'm not so sure. Rotten fish is extremely gross. The notion that it's not when fermented in salt is not entirely obvious. Having said that, it is definitely obvious as a byproduct of fish preservation. If people start producing dried salted fish, someone is bound to notice that the juice is actually tasty. I wonder how commonly available sea salt was in East Asia compared to the Mediterranean. It is saltier and has a much drier climate and thus producing lots of salt is easier.
So is smelly or mouldy french cheese. I think a lot of fermented products are basically preservation techniques gone sideways.
Smells funny, looks funny but doesn't make you sick when you eat it, you don't just throw food away when it is scarce. And after some time you develop a taste for it.
> I think a lot of fermented products are basically preservation techniques gone sideways.
My theory also :) Given historical harsh winters in Europe you're gonna eat whatever there is in the middle of a winter, spoiled or not. Turned out some of that spoiled stuff is quite good.
Had read it, you implied that it might not have been "commonly available" in Asia, which makes no sense. So I noted that people do it all the time (and don't mean "romans only").
> The notion that it's not when fermented in salt is not entirely obvious
I find it somewhat astounding when people equate "it's not entirely obvious (to me / a modern individual) to "it's unlikely to be discoverable by one or more of millions of individuals throughout past generations".
Not only is this something millions of people had lifetimes to potentially discover, working with food & preservation would've been necessarily a much more fundamental part of most people's daily lives in the past than it is now.
That's interesting, because from the outside Chinese cooking seems to be barbaric compared to Vietnamese cooking. Chinese cooking styles varies more, but they often prefer barbaric techniques, like overcooking, over saucing, using stark with lots of sugar, soy over fish sauce, ... even in terms of their own style.
Best cooking is definitely from Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia.
As someone who has spent the last 20 years in the region, I can tell you that there is awesome Chinese food, it's just hard to find outside of China and tends to be heavily regional. I share your affinity for Thai and Vietnamese flavour profiles and their emphasis on freshness, though - actually just made bun bo hue for dinner!
Fish sauce is very simple. You only need two ingredients: fish and salt. Any cultures living near an ocean can independently develop some version of fish sauce.
If there's any link between Vietnam and Rome, we'd have found traces of them along the Silk Road or maritime routes.
In Vietnam, besides fish sauce, there are other sauces "mam" made from different fishes and seafoods. Vietnamese people may have developed these "mam" before they developed the current fish sauce. Their fish sauce may have come from other "mam" than Rome.
Side note: The article appears on South China Morning Post. China often sees Vietnam as barbaric, inferior. Maybe, they couldn't see how Vietnamese could invent such a good sauce. :)