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To the physician Tobias Venner, in his 'Via recta ad vitam longam' of 1620, they were ‘Anchovas, the famous meat of drunkards’... The association with alcohol has been a durable one. In Spain, tapas - often anchovy-based and formerly offered free - have long been a staple of the taberna.

What makes the anchovy so special? ... Arguably, it can be reduced to one word: umami. Anchovies, however they are preserved, have some of the highest levels of umami - really, an amino acid called glutamate - of any food on the planet. It’s an addictive pleasure.

Although both the Phoenicians and Greeks discovered the anchovy’s pleasures, it was the Romans who put it on the food map through their fish sauces, of which garum is the best known. The sauces were probably all produced using the same method... Its potency proved ambivalent: Horace called it a ‘table delicacy’; he also said ‘It stinks’...

Either way, it was big business: the garum workshops in Tróia, on the Portuguese coast, produced some 35,000 litres annually. Where Rome went, garum went, too: traces of it have been found everywhere from Hadrian’s Wall to Salzburg, from Switzerland to Palestine. Academics disagree on the fish used in the sauce, but then so do classical authorities. The assumption has long been that garum, supposedly an elite food, was made from suitably expensive fish, such as mackerel. But Beckman argues that archaeological evidence from Pompeii - according to Pliny the Elder an important production centre in the ancient world - suggests otherwise. In Pompeii, anchovies predominated.

Any history of food is always also a history of class, and anchovies have long been subject to crashing condescension. Few have been as blunt as the Italian doctor Alessandro Petronio, who wrote in 1592 that they were ‘food for the poor’ and ‘for rough people, accustomed to exertion’. [...]

Anchovies have also been markers of political identity. Anthimus, a sixth-century Byzantine exile, banished garum from the royal diet in his medical treatise. Perhaps the recommendation reflected a personal antipathy, but perhaps it also symbolised a political rejection of Roman culture among the coming peoples of northern Europe. South of the Alps the Lombards, originally from southern Scandinavia but now identifying with the might of the old empire, went the other way, buying and selling garum along the river Po and using it as part payment for its army officers.

Beckman doggedly traces the love affair with the anchovy from the streets of Pompeii to the wood-fired ovens of California’s Spago and Chez Panisse. After a survey of its role in food culture from ancient Rome through to medieval Europe, subsequent chapters trace the same arc through French, British, Spanish, Italian and American culinary history. His practice of trawling through century after century of each country’s cookery books does become repetitive, although it also proves an effective way of tracking changes in taste and fashion. But like all stories about food, the anchovy’s tale is ultimately about how what we eat powerfully underpins our sense of identity, security and comfort.