December
12
/ 2015
Underwater Italian archaeologists have located a first or second century AD shipwreck that was carrying 3,000 clay jars filled with Roman fish sauce made by fermentation of salted fish intestines. Fish sauce or garum may not sound appetizing to modern people, but the ancients found it delicious and ate it at banquets. It was also sold in street food stands around the Roman Empire. It was highly nutritious and was a source of what we now call monosodium glutamate, a flavor enhancer. The archaeologists, led by Simonluca Trigona, found the ship 200 meters (656 feet) deep after fisherman dragged up fragments of amphorae in their nets in 2012 about five miles (8 kilometers) off of Alassio on Italy’s Ligurian coast
