Ossigeno

Phu �uoc is a Vietnamese island surrounded by the warm waters of the Gulf of Thailand. In this earthly paradise humid air is impregnated with an intense and pungent smell derived from fish in fermentation. It is here that first kecap manufactures were born, condiment at the base of the whole South-East Asian cuisine - the equivalent of olive oil for Italians, of soy sauce for Chinese. Amber colour and extremely strong flavour, kecap is composed of few natural ingredients: fish [anchovies, herring or sardines], water, salt and time. Its manufacturing process is very simple. Immersed in water, fish is fermented under the salt effect in an anaerobic environment, in small buried jars, from 8 to 12 months. After this period, the exudate reaching the surface is collected. - I T R E M A I N S - to be revealed the history of the name by which this dressing spread over the centuries all around the world. A path that brought it from Asia to Europe, then to the American continent, beginning its journey in the sixteenth century thanks to Fujian Chinese seamen’s contraband. Those were the years of the Ming dynasty, when the Empire of the Rising Sun was closed to maritime traffic and the only possible ways to import were the furtive and clandestine ones. It happened that going up the Mekong river, in Vietnam, Fujian sailors met and discovered the sauce, during one of their illegal shipments. They fell in love with this intense flavour and baptized the condiment as ke-tchup , ‘ preserved fish sauce ’ in Hokkien, the southern Fujian’ and Taiwan’s language - a word no longer existing now. However, its syllables have survived: tchup , still meaning 'sauce', and ke , indicating preserved fish. Soon, Fujianese fleets’ intense maritime activity spread ke-tchup throughout South-East Asia, contaminating the culinary traditions of the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. trilogia scandinava della fermentazione ittica · H O W · FORGOT HIMSELF The attempt to appropriate amatter and a taste is never a pure act of emulation, but a slow and inexorable process of transformation. This is affirmed even by the millenary history of kecap , an ancient oriental sauce made with fermented fish, far ancestor of the very popular tomato ketchup . 87 86 i n f e r m e n t o i n f e r m e n t #in ferment curated by Marco Lessi KECAP