Pissalat

What it is

Pissalat is a strongly flavoured paste of salted, fermented small fish, traditionally from the Nice region of southeastern France. It is not a clear fish sauce. The solids of the fish stay in the finished paste, which is spread on bread or used to season hors d'oeuvres, fish, cold meat and the local dish pissaladiere.

The name comes from the Nicard words peis salat, meaning salted fish, which is also the sense of the Old Provencal word the page gives for it.

Antiquity and the name

The encyclopedia entry compares pissalat with the Mesopotamian siqqu, a salted fish preparation it dates to about 1700 BC, and with the Roman garum, a fish sauce made by macerating fish and aromatics in salt. Those comparisons describe a family of salted fish products. They do not show that pissalat descends from either.

The Trésor de la langue française informatisé reports the earliest Niçois attestation in 1539 as “il pisalat de Nizza,” citing Jean Badat’s chronicle in Romania 25, page 63. E. Cais de Pierlas’s 1896 edition describes Badat’s chronicle as a contemporary account covering 1516–1567; its entry for 1538 also mentions salted fish from Nice being made into a sauce. These sources document the word and a related salted-fish condiment, not the beginning of the preparation or evidence for the modern formula or its safety.

A local industry

Salting sardines and anchovies in the Nice region was a centuries-old local trade. At the start of the nineteenth century it employed about a dozen families. Louis Roubaudi praised the paste in his 1843 book Nice et ses environs, recommending it with olive oil, vinegar and salted olives as a stimulant to appetite.

The trade largely disappeared from commerce during the Second World War. Small artisanal and family producers keep the paste going, and in many kitchens salted anchovies or anchovy puree stand in for it, especially in pissaladiere.

Making it

The fish is pounded in a mortar and brined with salt, pepper, olive oil and herbs and spices. The mixture is kept in a large terracotta terrine in a cool place and macerated and fermented for several months.

During that time it is stirred daily to form a paste and the rising oil is skimmed once a week. After about a month the paste is passed through a fine sieve, and it is then stored in glass jars covered with olive oil. The source gives no temperature, salt ratio or endpoint for the fermentation.

Open questions

The source gives no quantities, no salt level and no temperature for the fermentation, so the proportions and the finished product's safety cannot be set from it. Producer specifications and a documented analysis of the paste would be needed before the method could be treated as reliable. Sources on the origin of the name and of pissaladiere differ, and the page's claims about them are not confirmed here.