Review: A Twist in the Tail: How the Humble Anchovy Flavoured Western Cuisine by Christopher Beckman
A delightfully obsessive exploration of the anchovy's journey through the foodways of the West
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.