All Hail the Mighty Anchovy

"A Twist in the Tail

By Christopher Beckman

Hurst, 368 pages, $29.99

The most renowned Mediterranean fish swallowed Jonah, but the quintessential one can be eaten whole.

The anchovy is the one fish that Mediterranean cuisine cannot do without.

It can be served fresh or salted, fried in batter, dissolved into sauces or slung onto a pizza to impart the umami of the Italians.

The British whip anchovies into Gentleman's Relish and spread it on toast.

Americans take their anchovies as canapes or toss them into a Caesar salad.

I like anchovies. I have hunted them from the western reaches of the Mediterranean, where the slim white boquerones float in the shallows of oil and vinegar in the covered market of Barcelona; along the coast to Collioure, France, where the quayside shops sell anchovies fresh, salted, pickled and pureed; up to Venice, where the dark sludge of anchovy sauce on pasta tastes like dredgings from the lagoon; and farther east, where the fresh gavros of Greece are fried whole in batter.

Christopher Beckman also likes anchovies. "A Twist in the Tail" offers a gastronomic tour through the kitchens and cookbooks of the West. Anchovies have been at the top of shopping lists since ancient times -- each silvery little fish is a flavor bomb.

One hundred grams (about 3 1/2 ounces) of anchovy contains approximately 1,200 milligrams of glutamate, the lip-smacking amino acid, and imparts as much flavor as a bite of Roquefort cheese.

Yet there is no accounting for taste. Anchovies, Mr. Beckman shows, have frequently been a victim of their popularity, whether as a cheap source of protein for the poor, preserved in rancid oil, or exposed to the vagaries of the pizzeria. They retain a remarkable posthumous ability to polarize the senses of smell and taste: "It stinks," Horace wrote of garum, the ubiquitous Roman sauce made by fermenting fish in salt. Pliny the Elder called garum, whose taste probably resembled modern nam pla and other Asian fish sauces, a "secretion of putrefying matter," but also an "exquisite liquid." Martial compared the body odor of a woman named Thais to "an amphora of putrid garum," but devoted an epigram to it, "The Proud Sauce."

Garum was the pride of the Roman table. The factory at Troia, Portugal, produced up to 35,000 liters (almost 9,250 gallons) of garum a year. The poor ate allec, the dregs of the process, as a paste; the rich bought "small-batch artisan garum" for their banquets. But pride comes before a decline and fall. When the barbarians took over, the courts of Europe forgot about the classical condiment. It became cheaper to sprinkle salt on your meat than to manufacture and import garum.

The anchovy-rich Roman recipes of the "Apicius" collection vanished for centuries.

In a dark age for dinner, only the Lombards followed Edward Gibbon's recipe. Assimilating their northern palates to the tastes of the civilized people they had conquered, the Lombards settled in northern Italy and developed a passion for garum. The rest of Western Europe ate herring for centuries. A third of the days in the Christian calendar were meatless, so the commercial herring business became essential to the medieval economy.

 As European culture revived, the French started the Renaissance and recovered the anchovy.

In 1455, the humanist Enoch d'Ascoli rediscovered the Apicius in a monastic library.

In 1536 the first postmedieval cookbook, published at Lyon, included a recipe for anchovy butter. What spreads grows thinner: By the early 1900s, the simplified recipes of Auguste Escoffier ditched the anchovy for butter and cream. The silver fish survived in the kitchens of Provence, paired with tomatoes.

The first recorded English reference to anchovies is in Shakespeare's "Henry IV, Part One." When Prince Hal is carousing at the Boar's Head Tavern, his friends criticize Falstaff's consumption of a chicken dinner followed by "anchovies and sack." Samuel Pepys ate anchovies for breakfast but was "ill with them all night" after an especially salty batch. The last two recipes in William Kitchiner's "Apicius Redivivus" (1817) were anchovy toast and anchovy toast with a drinking song. In 1931, the melody, augmented by Francis Scott Key's lyrics, became the American national anthem.

While the American anchovy languished until the foodie revival of the 1980s, ordinary Italians never forsook it. Neapolitans carried the anchovy on a pizza, first to the New World and then, after 1945, to northern Italy, where the descendants of the Lombards had kept the faith with dishes such as ossobuco. The Spanish now eat 5.9 pounds of anchovies each annually, but not until the "hunger years" after their Civil War did anchovies move inland to wash up on the counters of tapas bars. The United States remains the last, best hope for the anchovy lover. Most of the rich stocks of Pacific anchovies are used as fishing bait. Instead of going to Mars, perhaps Elon Musk could open a cannery.

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Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.” [1]

1. Spring Books: All Hail the Mighty Anchovy. Green, Dominic.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 05 Apr 2025: R7.