Until I visited Málaga, I had no idea that the Malagueños were all about the anchovy. Fried anchovies are amazing, and I’ve been eating them like french fries the whole week. Malaga anchovies are so good and so famous that the nickname for Malagueños is “Los Boquerones,” which, naturally, means ‘anchovy’ in Spanish.
But before the residents of this sunny seaside town fried anchovies and sold them as drinking snacks, their ancestors took anchovies and other similarly unlucky denizens of the nearby ocean, cut them open, and left their guts to decompose/rot/ferment in the Mediterranean sun.
This wasn't some weird fish torture fetish, although the Phoenicians were likely into that, too. Instead, they were making garum. If you're thinking "fish gut sauce, yum," well, you're not alone. Even the Romans, whose demand for garum was one reason they were so protective of the (then) province of Hispania Baetica, were still a bit conflicted about the culinary merits of the sauce. Pliny the Elder, never one to mince words, described it as "the putrefaction of guts." But he still used it. Everyone used it.
