Soy sauce was invented to make expensive salt go further
Soy sauce took its modern form in Han dynasty China about 2,200 years ago, and its purpose was thrift: salt was costly, and fermenting it with beans stretched it. The earlier version used fermented fish. Europeans later loved the sauce but could not brew it, because they lacked the essential mould.
The sauce is a fermented paste of soybeans, roasted grain and brine, worked by koji moulds such as Aspergillus oryzae, which gives its saltiness and deep umami. Under the Zhou dynasty, Chinese cooks salted fish and fermented it, sometimes with soybeans. By the Han era beans had taken over as the main ingredient, producing soy paste with soy sauce as a by-product, while the fish-based line evolved separately into fish sauce.
Soy paste is listed on bamboo slips from the Mawangdui tomb site. The oldest named precursor of the liquid, qingjiang, is recorded in AD 40, and several more appear in an agricultural manual from 540. By the Song dynasty, 960 to 1279, the name jiangyou had settled. Buddhists arriving in Japan from China in the seventh century brought vegetarian habits and soy products with them, where soy sauce became shoyu, replacing an older fish sauce.
Korea's brewing seems to go back to the Three Kingdoms period; murals in a fourth-century Goguryeo tomb show the jars used. Soy sauce and bean paste were prepared for King Sinmun's wedding in February 683 and sent as relief after a Khitan invasion in 1018 and during a famine in 1052. In the Philippines the sauce is first documented in 1613 through a record of adobo, though historian Raymond Sokolov thinks it was already part of the local cooking.
The Dutch East India Company began exporting shoyu in 1647, and in 1737 it shipped seventy-five big barrels from Dejima to Batavia, sending thirty-five on to the Netherlands. Without the right fungus, Europeans improvised: late eighteenth-century cookbooks gave mushroom versions, and a 1770 Swedish recipe by Cajsa Warg used allspice and mace. By the mid-1800s Japanese soy sauce had largely vanished from European shops, and the condiment came to be seen as Chinese.
Source: Soy sauce
