the universal condiment of China and Japan, is also widely used throughout SE Asia. It is the main condiment in Indonesia, where soya beans are grown extensively. In Vietnam and the Philippines it competes with the fish sauces of the region, which it resembles in composition. The ingredients are normally soya beans, wheat, and salt.
Soy sauce is used in the Orient as freely as salt is in the West, and indeed often instead of salt, as it has a salty taste. This is but one element in its flavour, which is difficult to describe since it interacts with the flavours of the various foods to which it is applied. It can be described as having a sharp, tangy, almost meaty quality.
Although soya beans have been grown in China for at least 3,500 years, the sauce is a slightly more recent invention. It was developed during the Zhou dynasty (1134–246 bc), and probably evolved in conjunction with the fermented fish sauces, many of which involved both fish and rice. The moulds Aspergillus oryzae and A. soyae are the principal agents in producing soy sauce, and the enzymes which they provide are similar to those which ferment fish sauce. These organisms are common and could accidentally have got to work on soya beans, with results which would have been recognized as a ‘fishless fish sauce’.
Early soy sauce was a solid paste known as sho or mesho. This developed into two products, liquid shoyu and solid miso. In China the liquid sauce is used more than the paste, while in Japan both are of equal importance.
The European name ‘soy’ (similar in all languages) originates with the 17th-century Dutch traders who brought the sauce back to Europe, where it became popular despite its high price. Old silver bottle labels marked ‘soy’ occasionally appear in antique shops. The beans are called soya or soy after the sauce, not the other way round.
The traditional process for making soy sauce is still used for sauce of high quality. In Japan it starts in April and continues for a whole year, making use of the changing temperatures in the different seasons. There are several stages, and fermentation is carried out by many different moulds, bacteria, and yeasts which successively predominate in the developing sauce as conditions change to suit them. In outline the process is this. Defatted, steamed soya beans and roasted, crushed wheat are mashed together. The mixture is inoculated with tane-koji, a starter culture of the two necessary Aspergillus moulds, and is allowed to ferment, then mixed with a strong salt solution and inoculated with another starter containing several kinds of bacteria and yeasts for a further fermentation which lasts from 8 to 12 months. The reactions in this last period create a complex blend of substances contributing to the final flavour. The chief elements are salt, amino acids, organic acids (lactic and acetic), alcohols, sugars, and numerous volatile aromatic substances including vanillin, the flavour principle of vanilla. When fermentation is complete, the mixture is filtered or racked to extract the sauce; and this is commonly pasteurized to kill the remaining organisms and arrest fermentation. (There are, however, some special sauces which have been allowed to go on fermenting for several years.) One tonne each of defatted soya beans, wheat, and salt produce 5,000 litres of soy sauce.
Soy sauce is available in both light and dark varieties. The most extreme of the dark types is the viscous Indonesian kecap made from black soya beans. In Japan the standard kind is the light one favoured in the Osaka region, amber in colour and saltier than the dark types.
Tamari is a soy sauce made without any wheat, from whole or defatted soya beans only, and is darker in colour than the standard kind.
Something very much like soy sauce, which apparently originated in much the same way from ancient Middle Eastern fish sauces, was made in the Arab world during the Middle Ages under the name murri. It was not made from beans but from mouldy barley, sometimes extended with wheat flour or bread; see barley.
Alan Davidson was a distinguished author and publisher, and one of the world's best-known writers on fish and fish cookery. In 1975 he retired early from the diplomatic service—after serving in, among other places, Washington, Egypt, Tunisia, and Laos, where he was British Ambassador—to pursue a fruitful second career as a food historian and food writer extraordinaire. Among his popular books are Seafood of South-East Asia, North Atlantic Seafood, and Mediterranean Seafood. In 2003, shortly before his death, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize for his contribution to European culture.
