Have you ever had that craving, sometimes late at night, for teriyaki chicken and fried rice? Or maybe you enjoy a little sushi or a good pad Thai once in a while.

All of these dishes are not reproducible without soy sauce. And what exactly is this dark and salty brew?

We all know that soy sauce has soy beans in it . . . somewhere. How possible would it be for our stranded Americans to fabricate something like soy sauce?

History

Soy sauce is considered the oldest condiment used in the world today. The Chinese have been using soy sauce for more than 2500 years. Cakes of soybean paste, sometimes mixed with wheat, are made and infected with a particular mold called Aspergillus and then left alone for three days as the mold breaks down the proteins of the beans.

When the cakes are ready, they are placed in barrels or tanks with salt. The process from this point is more a function of lactobacilli and yeast than anything else. These further break down the proteins and sugars.

After fermenting for several months, the brown liquid is siphoned off, leaving the soybean mash behind, and this salty liquid is used to flavor food.

Anciently, people wanted to preserve meat and fish. The proteins were kept in barrels with salt. But contrary to the process of drying as salt cod, or salt preserving as with lox, the fish in the barrels was completely broken down to a liquid state.

The Romans had much the same process, and the product they made from this preserved fish was called liquimen or murri. A fish with high fat content such as anchovies or mackerel would be placed, whole, in barrels layered with salt. As the lactobacilli worked within the fish, the flesh was actually broken down completely, except for a thick sludge in the bottom of the barrel. Liquimen was much prized by the Romans on a whole variety of products.

Since the dawn of time, the Chinese used this process, then draining off the liquid fish or meat sauce, and using it for a condiment. Then, in the fifth century, when the Buddhist religion became more popular, they searched for a way to continue to have this flavoring without using meat. That was when they developed the bean and wheat paste, first left to mold, and then fermented as one would have done with the meat or fish. So soy sauce is a vegetarian innovation that has stuck with us for more than one and a half millennia.

At the end of the Roman era, the market for liquimen dropped off, as it was an expensive process. One of the major producers in Spain continued for quite some time, as the people in the area developed a taste for murri, and so kept making it. It can even be found today in one tiny village on the Spanish Atlantic coast.

Other Possible Sauces

There are other sauces referenced in old cookbooks, or other writings. These would include murri and Worcestershire sauce, and some of the fish sauces used in the Far East.

Charles Perry, the long time food critic for the Los Angeles Times, has spent a lot of time translating Arabic cookbooks. Many recipes in these call for murri, a salty, fermented condiment. It has not been made in the Arab world since the 14th or 15th century, so it was unavailable to him. In order to faithfully reproduce some of these recipes, he set out to make murri.

According to his research, the Arabic world used barley paste. It was patted into little cakes, placed under fig leaves for four months, and then mixed with water and strained.

The office staff at the Times, where Perry conducted his experimentation, were highly interested in the process. Because it had been fermenting there for such a long time, and had developed its own coat of fluffy mold, the staff named one of the cakes "Whiskers."

And what did it taste like? According to Perry, it was exactly like cheap soy sauce. Not the kind that is mostly soy beans, and fermented in tanks for months, but that on the shelf that is chemically changed in a quicker process, and therefore can be sold to the American public much more affordably. It is much easier to just go and buy cheap soy sauce and substitute it for the murri instead of making ...