A Twist in the Tail: How the Humble Anchovy Flavoured Western Cuisine, Christopher Beckman, Hurst, £18.99

To the physician Tobias Venner, in his Via recta ad vitam longam of 1620, they were ‘Anchovas, the famous meat of drunkards’, only good ‘to commend a cup of wine to the pallat, and… therefore chiefly profitable for Vintners’. No surprise, then, that Prince Hal finds a receipt for ‘Anchovies and sack after supper’ in the pockets of a sleeping Falstaff in Henry IV Part 1. The association with alcohol has been a durable one. In Spain, tapas – ‘small realities’, as 20th-century Spanish foodwriter José Sarrau called them – often anchovy-based and formerly offered free, have long been a staple of the taberna. Anchovies featured heavily among the canapés of choice in the speakeasies of Prohibition America. It is perhaps apt, then, that they should also feature so prominently in Worcestershire Sauce, a vital part of that supreme hangover cure, the Bloody Mary.

What makes the anchovy so special? A Twist in the Tail, Christopher Beckman’s delightfully obsessive account of the anchovy in western cuisine, is here to explain. Arguably, it can be reduced to one word: umami. Anchovies, however they are preserved, have some of the highest levels of umami – really, an amino acid called glutamate – of any food on the planet. It’s an addictive pleasure. When Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, abdicated in 1556 and retired to the monastery of Yuste in western Spain, he demanded a ready supply. So addicted to them was he that on one occasion his doctor had to remonstrate with him to stop him starting on a barrelful that had putrefied in transit.

Although both the Phoenicians and the Greeks discovered the anchovy’s pleasures, it is the Romans who first put it on the food map through their fish sauces, of which garum is the best known. The sauces were probably all produced using the same method: layers of fish were alternated with layers of salt in jars or vats and left to cure, often in direct sunlight, for anything up to a year. Its potency proved ambivalent: Horace called it a ‘table delicacy’; he also said ‘It stinks’. No argument there: when archaeologists started excavating a garum shop in Pompeii in 1960 they uncovered amphorae that still retained its distinctive aroma after nearly 2,000 years.

Either way, it was big business: the garum workshops in Tróia, on the Portuguese coast, produced some 35,000 litres annually. Where Rome went, garum went, too: traces of it have been found everywhere from Hadrian’s Wall to Salzburg, from Switzerland to Palestine. Academics disagree on the fish used in the sauce, but then so do classical authorities. The assumption has long been that garum, supposedly an elite food, was made from suitably expensive fish, such as mackerel. But Beckman argues that archaeological evidence from Pompeii – according to Pliny the Elder an important production centre in the ancient world – suggests otherwise. In Pompeii, anchovies predominated.

Any history of food is always also a history of class, and anchovies have long been subject to crashing condescension. Few, however, have been as blunt as the Italian doctor Alessandro Petronio who wrote in 1592 that they were ‘food for the poor’ and ‘for rough people, accustomed to exertion’. On the other hand, it was with exertions of a particular kind in mind that Giacomo Casanova insisted on the addition of anchovy salad to a gourmet meal planned for the seduction of a beautiful nun in Venice, as he gleefully recounted in his memoirs. He would surely have approved of the tantalisingly named ‘Anchovy cocktail kisses’ found, along with 21 other anchovy-based hors d’oeuvres recipes, in a mid-20th-century American cookbook.

Another Italian food writer, Cesare Evitascandolo, suggested early in the 17th century that placing dishes of anchovies in the middle of a banqueting table ‘will suggest that the diners are rustics’. This would have been news to Samuel Pepys, who liked nothing better than ‘drinking wine and eating anchovies an hour or two’ and frequently offered dishes of them to his guests at home, and indeed to Patrick Lamb, who had cooked for English royalty, and whose Royal Cookery, published in 1710, contains elaborate plans of table settings that clearly show anchovies, among a vast array of other dishes, right in the centre of the table. Elevating humble dishes may be a 21^st-century culinary cliché, but it is far from a new phenomenon: Beckman identifies the concept in late-medieval cookbooks, such Le Viandier de Taillevant by Guillaume Tirel, another royal chef, which has a piquant recipe for roasted anchovies in mustard sauce, reproduced here.

If anchovies have been a food of excess and indulgence, they have also been a food of frugality and want. In the mid-15th century, impoverished young Alpine villagers in Piedmont began making annual treks to Genoa along the ancient Salt Road to bring back salted anchovies to their native hills and valleys, where bagna cauda, an anchovy-infused dipping sauce, first developed. The call of one of these itinerant traders ran: ‘Anchovies of Malaga, of Setabal, buy them, eat them, and they will keep you warm all winter!’ In the 19th century, Basque and Cantabrian women hauled stocks of preserved fish inland from the coastal towns and villages, covering up to 25 miles a day to trade the catch with wine, oil, wheat and vinegar.

Anchovies have been markers of political identity, too. Anthimus, sixth-century Byzantine exile and physician to the Frankish king Theuderic, banished garum from the royal diet in his medical treatise De observatione ciborum. Perhaps the recommendation reflected a personal antipathy, but perhaps it also symbolised a political rejection of Roman culture among the coming peoples of northern Europe. South of the Alps the Lombards, originally from southern Scandinavia but now identifying with the might of the old empire, went the other way, buying and selling garum along the river Po and using it as part payment for its army officers.

The British, as a result of their own imperial adventures, picked up on the anchovy’s potential in sauces and condiments. Traders in East Asia seemingly first encountered ketchup as a fish sauce on Java and Sumatra; the word itself derives from the Hokkien language of Fujian and Taiwan. The first British recipe, adapted to the native tradition of pickling, appears in Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife in 1727. Smith’s recipe contains 12 or 14 anchovies. A century later, William Kitchiner was using a quarter of a pound of them in his ‘Tomata Catsup’. One 18^th-century ketchup recipe boasted that it would keep for 20 years. Clearly, these were puissant sauces in more ways than one, which seems to be how the British liked it. It’s no wonder that John Burgess’s Genuine Anchovy Paste accompanied Nelson to the Battle of the Nile and Captain Scott to the Antarctic.

Italian anchovy sauces, meanwhile, were a different kettle of fish. Giovanni Francesco Vasselli’s version, highly regarded in 17th-century Italy, paired the fish with vinegar, cinnamon, cloves, pepper, candied orange zest and a kind of spiced biscuit. A few decades later Antonio Latini, chef to a cardinal, developed a sauce which he named ‘Little Sassy One’. It captures, Beckman writes, ‘the ambiguous status of anchovies that often followed them throughout history: flavourful, but rather common and loose’. True, but surely – side-eyeing Britain’s fondness for prosaically named, punchy condiments – there is something of the national character in there, too.

Beckman doggedly traces the love affair with the anchovy from the streets of Pompeii to the wood-fired ovens of California’s Spago and Chez Panisse. After a survey of its role in food culture from ancient Rome through to medieval Europe, subsequent chapters trace the same arc through French, British, Spanish, Italian and American culinary history. His practice of trawling through century after century of each country’s cookery books does become repetitive, although it also proves an effective way of tracking changes in taste and fashion. But like all stories about food, the anchovy’s tale is ultimately about how what we eat powerfully underpins our sense of identity, security and comfort. Beckman writes of a letter, written on papyrus in the fourth century and found in the excavations of the rubbish heaps of Oxyrhynchus in Roman Egypt, which speaks deeply to those emotions. The letter is from a mother to her son and she wants him to come home. Her lure? Garum, his favourite fish sauce.