A 2,000-year-old Roman vessel, discovered off the Spanish coast in the Mediterranean sea has numerous bottles of fish sauce. The olden delicacy, known as garum, was usually made from fermented fish guts and blood and stored in containers called Amphoras.
The vessel is the largest Roman shipwreck ever found. It was located in 2000 and is from somewhere in the first century A.D. The ship probably sank in a storm while sailing to Rome from the Spanish port of Cadiz, giving historians important hints about ancient trade routes.
It has about 1,200 well-preserved clay jars with just traces of ‘Fishy’ sauce since the Ceramic-and-mortar seals on the garum jars got eroded by the sea.
Pliny the Elder, the first-century Roman scholar, wrote of this sauce:
Scarcely any other liquid except unguents [healing ointments] has come to be more highly valued, bringing fame even to the nations that make it.
The shipwreck site was a great attraction to thieves wanting to take Amphoras (Amphoras are worth about a thousand U.S. dollars each) as trophies so the govt had to cage it up. Apparently Romans liked the Italian sauce best. As of today I love Italian food.
Via: National Geographic
