Fish Sauces and Fish Pastes

Even though we have documentary evidence that the ancient Greeks and Romans used garum as a fish sauce more than 2,500 years ago, we probably have to look to the cultures of the East, and especially to that of China, to find the origins of contemporary fish sauces. It was mostly the Chinese living in the coastal areas who made fish sauce, probably by combining small fish with the innards from larger cooking fish, causing fermentation. Once soybeans were added to the salted and fermented fish in order to stretch the ingredients further, the liquid started to evolve into what would later become soy sauce, which came to be used much more widely, particularly inland.