From Falstaff’s pocket

For such small fish, anchovies pack a big punch. They can be eaten on their own or as part of almost any dish, from pasta sauces to vinaigrettes. Yet for every person who loves them there will be another for whom they provoke the deepest revulsion.

Christopher Beckman’s fascinating history explores this polarized relationship in the culinary outlooks of five countries: Britain, France, Italy, Spain and the US. It’s a story of changing tastes, of class and of regional and cultural differences. In Beckman’s telling anchovies are often in the background, but that is fitting given the role they have played through the years: a garnish here, the basis for a sauce there; a hidden but vital ingredient that brings out and enhances other flavours.

Why do anchovies do this? The short answer is that they impart a strong dose of “umami”. The Romans recognized our innate desire for this fifth taste long before the Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda put a name to it in the 1900s. They were the first culture to produce fish sauce – garum – on an industrial scale. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that anchovies have long played an important role in Italian cooking, although the ways in which they have been consumed have differed between social strata. During the Renaissance, for instance, the poorest ate them in great quantities, often to enhance the flavour of plain gruel or stewed roots, while the country’s elite were warned to eat them with restraint and told that they were best left to those with “rough constitutions”.

Class is a key theme throughout the book. Beckman explains that, as in Italy, anchovies were long a staple of rustic cooking in France, but fell in and out of flavour with the higher echelons of society. The culinary classic Le Viandier de Taillevent, which was published in 1486 and defined French cuisine for the next century and a half, provided a hierarchy of fish. Anchovies were at the bottom. Then, in the mid-17th century, they became a key flavouring agent for aristocratic sauces thanks to François Pierre de La Varenne’s revolutionary Le Cuisinier françois (1651). Some 150 years later they were sidelined once again when Antonin Carême, France’s leading pâtissier, codified the four original “mother sauces” (velouté, béchamel, allemande and espagnole), none of which included anchovies.

In early modern Spain your diet signified not only your place in the social hierarchy, but also your religious identity, with potentially fatal consequences. During the Reconquista, Jews and Muslims were required to convert to Christianity and made subject to strict surveillance to ensure that they were not engaging in “heretical” practices behind closed doors. Butchers were watched to see who was abstaining from pork, fishmongers for those who avoided shellfish. Anchovies were prominent in Moorish cuisine, and remained a staple in southern Spain, particularly floured and fried – a forerunner of both fish and chips and Japanese tempura. It was not until the Spanish Civil War that the north caught up, leading to the Spanish becoming the world’s top consumers of anchovies.

While our understanding of anchovies in French, Italian and Spanish history is informed principally by cookbooks, the first recorded mention of the food in Britain is in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1, where it is found in a receipt in the pocket of Falstaff. By linking the fish to the errant knight who spends much of his time in the Boar’s-Head Tavern in Eastcheap, consorting with the lowest of the low, Shakespeare reinforces its complex relationship with class.

Soon, however, they were no longer just a bar snack. By the 1660s they featured both in highbrow cookbooks and in the writing of Samuel Pepys, the celebrated diarist and gourmand who “grazed” his way through London. As the empire expanded, traders began to bring back fish sauces of Javanese origin, known as “catchup”. During the Industrial Revolution these gave rise to a variety of mass- produced anchovy-based products, from Gentleman’s Relish to Worcestershire Sauce. Such sauces were never quite embraced in the US, so, in tomato ketchup, anchovies were replaced by molasses and vinegar.

The author’s focus on the West comes at the expense of any meaningful discussion of the anchovy’s role in Asian cuisines, where they are widely embraced and consumed in a variety of ways as part of sauces, fresh or even sun-dried. The author briefly mentions this global divide in his introduction, but never really explains it, leaving the question of how it developed unanswered. Perhaps there is a companion volume to be written, though without the love-hate tension at its heart, the history would perhaps be a less interesting one.

Nonetheless, Christopher Beckman makes a strong case for why anchovies should be a staple of any chef’s pantry. He points out that, as more of us switch away from red meat, anchovies – sometimes labelled “the bacon of the sea” – offer a flavourful alternative. These small, fast-growing fish offer a remarkably sustainable substitute for various sea foods on the verge of collapse due to overfishing. Their place low down the food chain means they are low in heavy metals. And they are packed with protein, vitamins, minerals and omega-3 fatty acids.

Roger Domeneghetti’s most recent book is Everybody Wants to Rule the World: Britain, sport and the 1980s, 2023

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