Soy Sauce - History

History

Soy sauce originated in China sometime in the 2nd century BCE and its use later spread to East and Southeast Asia. Like many salty condiments, soy sauce was probably originally a way to stretch salt, historically an expensive commodity. In ancient China, fermented fish with salt was used as a condiment in which soybeans were included during the fermentation process. Eventually, this was replaced and the recipe for soy sauce, jiangyou (酱油), using soybeans as principal ingredient, with fermented fish-based sauces developing separately into fish sauce.

Records of the Dutch East India Company list soy sauce as a commodity in 1737, when seventy-five large barrels were shipped from Dejima, Japan, to Batavia (present-day Jakarta) on the island of Java. Thirty-five barrels from that shipment were then shipped to the Netherlands. In the 18th century, Isaac Titsingh published accounts of brewing soy sauce. Although earlier descriptions of soy sauce had been disseminated in the West, this was among the earliest to focus specifically on the brewing of the Japanese version. By the mid-19th century, the Japanese soy sauce gradually disappeared from the European market, and soy sauce became synonymous with the Chinese product. Europeans were unable to make soy sauce because they did not understand the function of Aspergillus oryzae, the fungus used in its brewing.

One 19th century writer records that in China, the best soy sauce is "made by boiling beans soft, adding an equal quantity of wheat or barley, and leaving the mass to ferment; a portion of salt and three times as much water are afterwards put in, and the whole compound left for two or three months when the liquid is pressed and strained".