The anchovy’s ancient and varied story is ultimately about how food powerfully underpins our sense of identity, security and comfort. T

A little history of the anchovy - Engelsberg ideas

submited by

Style Pass

2024-09-19 18:30:07

The anchovy’s ancient and varied story is ultimately about how food powerfully underpins our sense of identity, security and comfort.

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.