> I am reminded of reading some classicists' attempt to create garum in the kitchen by making some unpleasant horror of mashed fish or something back in the eighties or nineties. No one ever mentioned in those kinds of write-ups back then that they still make fish sauce in Italy.

A more modern example might be that recently discovered Babylonian Lamb Stew [0]. Most of the scholarly reconstructions of the stew follow the recipe very literally, and the result is, frankly, awful, because ancient readers would probably have made cultural assumptions about certain steps in the recipe. Meanwhile, some internet cooks who take a stab at the same recipe come up with something arguably much better, because they're applying their knowledge as cooks to guess what might have been stated or unstated by the recipe. [1]

Makes you wonder why no one thought to just take a copy of one of the statues to a modern artist and say, "Hey! How would you paint this?" I'm willing to bet that, even now, it would be reasonably close to how an artist 2000 years ago might have approached it.

[0] https://eatshistory.com/the-oldest-recorded-recipe-babylonia...

[1] https://www.tastinghistory.com/recipes/babylonianlambstew

Huh. That's exactly how you make garum - an unpleasant horror of mashed fish. Refer to Max Miller and his spectacularly successful effort to reproduce Garum in his back yard.

Fish sauce is also really popular in southeast Asia and Worcestershire sauce is often made with fermented fish so can also be considered garum adjacent.

And fermented shrimp paste and fish sauce are a thing in pretty much whole southeast Asia. Garum isn't too different.

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrimp_paste

There was a similar, maybe apocryphal, story recently of academic archaeologists stumped about an ancient tool until a person pulled out a crochet kit to fidget with their hands near the exhibit and it became obvious that it wasn't a lost tool they just hadn't put it in the right context.