Ingredients

Fish Sauce

Citation Formats

General Reference

Food and Drink Atlas. "Fish Sauce." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-food.interactiveatlas.org/ingredients/fish-sauce.

APA Style

Food and Drink Atlas. (n.d.). Fish Sauce. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-food.interactiveatlas.org/ingredients/fish-sauce

BibTeX

@misc{foodanddrinkatlas-fish-sauce,
  author = {Food and Drink Atlas},
  title = {Fish Sauce},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-food.interactiveatlas.org/ingredients/fish-sauce},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

A pungent, salty liquid condiment made by fermenting fish, most often anchovies, with salt for months; foundational to the cuisines of Thailand, Vietnam and the wider Southeast Asian coast.

Facts

Disputed

Earliest Documented Use, From (Year)

from 300 BCE 1

the subject's own accountThe earliest documented antecedent is a Chinese fermented fish-and-soybean sauce recorded about 2300 years ago; the Southeast Asian fish sauce tradition this entity describes has no precisely dated early record of its own, so this pins the ancestral practice rather than a confirmed date for the regional product.

Origin Region

Mainland Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia, building on an earlier Chinese tradition of fermented fish-and-soybean sauces; Vietnam's Phan Thiet is often named as the birthplace of the Vietnamese style, but no single national origin is firmly settled among the Southeast Asian traditions. 1

the subject's own accountFood scholars split East Asian condiment traditions along a bean-fish divide, Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia) on fermented fish and Northeast Asia on fermented beans; which Southeast Asian nation's fish-sauce tradition is oldest is not documented, so this names the region and the candidate traditions rather than picking one.

Cross-Tradition Connections