LATIF NASSER: Hey, it's Latif. So today, we have a brand new episode. I am very excited to share it with you. It even has a special guest. But I sort of have to level with you about something first. Our parent station, WNYC, is in dire financial straits. We went through a round of layoffs about a year ago, and then just this month we went through a second round.

LATIF: Less money has been coming in, and to keep us up and running, the station has to cut costs. It costs a lot of money to make Radiolab. But for good reason, I swear. I see it over and over, I see how that money lets us commit to stories in a way that few other shows do.

LATIF: For example, in the episode that you are about to hear I spent an entire day driving back and forth in LA traffic just to get live sardines. But for every story we do, there are, like, 10 of those little things. And sometimes there's a bigger thing, too, that we feel, you know, there's no way to tell this story right without it.

LATIF: And that all is the way we want it. We want you to get this, like, seamless, rich, immersive, carefully-told and—importantly—fact-checked story that—that goes beyond the news. Stuff that goes past the conversations that everyone is already having.

LATIF: Now because of all this money stuff, we have to do that now with less, right? Less resources, less people. That's fine. We're not complaining. We love to do this. We love to make what we make for you. But that means we need your support, and in the last few years we have come up with a new way for you to support us that is better for us and better for you—The Lab.

LATIF: When you become a member of The Lab, you give us basically oxygen, and you, you get—you get a bunch of stuff, too. You get ad-free listening, bonus audio—like, stuff we cut from episodes for time. And if you sign up by the end of September, you'll get a free t-shirt that says, "There's A Radiolab For That."

LATIF: I promise you, Lab memberships are essential for us here at the show. If even a few more of you sign up, it will make a crucial difference. So please go to Radiolab.org/join, help us keep on going to the extreme lengths we do to take your ears and brains to places they've never been before. That's Radiolab.org/join.

LATIF: And without further ado, let's get to the episode. And if you get to the end of it, as I said, there's a special guest, which I'm just gonna tell you who it is because I can't help myself. It's Samin Nosrat, the chef. If you don't know and love her, you should and you probably will anyway after this. Enjoy!

[RADIOLAB INTRO]

SARAH QARI: Hi!

LATIF: [laughs] What's up, Sarah?

SARAH: [laughs]

LATIF: I'm Latif Nasser.

SARAH: I'm Sarah Qari, sitting in for Lulu this week.

LATIF: This is Radiolab. Do you have any idea what we're gonna talk about?

SARAH: No! I was like, this must be what Christmas morning feels like. Not that I would know. It's just like just get a present and in this case it's a story?

LATIF: Yeah.

SARAH: But anyway, yeah. No, I know nothing.

LATIF: Perfect! So today on the show, we have kind of the mother of all missing persons reports is what it is.

SARAH: Okay.

LATIF: It's the story of how about 50,000 people vanished off of the face of the Earth. And then how almost 2,000 years later, one man tried to find them.

STEVEN TUCK: Okay, there we go.

SARAH: Okay.

STEVEN TUCK: This is my speaking voice.

LATIF: Great. So how do you—what should I call you? Steve? Steven? Professor Tuck? Something else altogether?

STEVEN TUCK: Um, Steve. If you call me Professor Tuck, I'm expecting you to make a grade appeal. So ...

LATIF: Turn—okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. Well, I mean, I also wanted—that's the real reason for this call today.

STEVEN TUCK: This is for an extension on a paper, I know.

LATIF: All right, so Steve Tuck is a historian at Miami University. And the moment in history that he's just buried himself in for the last decade is—I mean, it's arguably the most iconic, dramatic disaster tragedy story in history.

STEVEN TUCK: The eruption of Vesuvius and the destruction, particularly of the city of Pompeii.

LATIF: Have you heard of Pompeii?

SARAH: Yeah, like the city that got covered in ash. People frozen in time.

LATIF: Yeah.

SARAH: Like, an entire population just wiped out in an instant.

LATIF: Right.

STEVEN TUCK: And that's sort of the popular perception.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Loki: This entire town is wiped off the face of this planet!]

LATIF: Museums, movies, books. The story's always basically the same.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: People died instantly of heat exposure.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: There was no way out.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Their tragic deaths have made Pompeii world famous.]

LATIF: It's sort of the one thing that everybody knows about.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Making it one of the most lethal volcanic events in human history.]

STEVEN TUCK: Everybody died.

LATIF: Instantly. No survivors.

SARAH: Right.

LATIF: However Steve, being the good historian that he is, always had this thought like, we all keep saying that there were no survivors ...

STEVEN TUCK: But as far as I could tell, no one had ever gone to look for them.

SARAH: Really?

LATIF: Yeah. According to Steve, you know, the one thing we all know about Pompeii is actually just an assumption. And through his work, the way I see Pompeii has completely changed. The way I used to see it as, like, a kind of like a cartoon tragedy, but then hearing him talk about it, like, it's become so much more human.

SARAH: Okay.

STEVEN TUCK: So I had this question, you know?

LATIF: Yeah.

LATIF: Okay, so the first thing Steve told me was that—something that's always left out of these popular accounts of Pompeii is just the cold, hard math.

STEVEN TUCK: Pre-eruption, the city of Pompeii ...

LATIF: The nearby city of Herculaneum and the surrounding countryside had a combined population of ...

STEVEN TUCK: Maybe 50,000 people.

LATIF: That's 50,000 people in the red zone, right? So just imagine the area completely destroyed by the volcano.

STEVEN TUCK: Right.

LATIF: Okay. And then how many human remains were discovered?

STEVEN TUCK: So between all of the excavations at Pompeii, Herculaneum, the villas that have been excavated, about 1,200.

SARAH: What? 1,200? That's it?

LATIF: Mm-hmm.

SARAH: That's like—what is that? That's like less than five percent of the people? That's tiny!

LATIF: Yeah. Of course, it could be, you know, the rest of the bodies are actually there but just havent been found or dug up yet.

LATIF: How much of the red zone has been excavated?

STEVEN TUCK: Oh, a tiny fraction.

LATIF: Oh, wow.

STEVEN TUCK: A tiny fraction.

SARAH: Oh.

STEVEN TUCK: There's a lot of land there to dig through.

SARAH: Okay. Okay, I see. So maybe the—all of their bodies are just buried in these other places that they haven't ...

LATIF: Maybe the other bodies are buried in these other places.

STEVEN TUCK: Maybe. But all of them? It seemed unlikely.

LATIF: But still, like—like, the town is right at the base of the volcano.

STEVEN TUCK: Right.

LATIF: You think people could've gotten out?

STEVEN TUCK: Well, it's a very complex eruptive event.

LATIF: Okay. Okay. Do you want to just walk me through it? Should we just play it out?

STEVEN TUCK: All right. Pompeii is a city right along the coast of the Bay of Naples. It's a beautiful location. I sound like a real estate agent but, you know, it's a gorgeous location down there in southern Italy along the coast.

LATIF: If you don't mind volcanoes, it's great!

STEVEN TUCK: That keeps the property values down.

LATIF: [laughs]

LATIF: Okay, so this is 79 AD.

STEVEN TUCK: On August 24. In the morning, there were earthquakes, but these were a common occurrence.

LATIF: So no one really paid attention to them. Probably just felt like a normal day.

STEVEN TUCK: Right.

LATIF: If I were to walk down the street in Pompeii, the main drag, what would I have seen?

STEVEN TUCK: You would have seen a long street with two lanes flanked by sidewalks. Many of the shops would have taken over part of the sidewalk. They move the things they're selling out there. Or the wine bars. People take over the sidewalk and part of the street as they're all crowded out there. And it's a very densely populated, very lively place.

LATIF: In the backdrop of all this, less than 10 miles to the northwest of the city, sat a large, green, cone-shaped mountain. And on this day at about one o'clock in the afternoon, if you were maybe taking a midday break, having some fish, some wine with friends at a sidewalk cafe, and happened to glance up at this mountain, you'd have seen the top of it just explode.

STEVEN TUCK: It's just pulverized and blown straight into the air.

LATIF: This massive dark column of rock and gas.

STEVEN TUCK: Rising up about 20 miles into the atmosphere.

LATIF: Towering over Pompeii higher than modern airplanes fly.

SARAH: Oh my God!

LATIF: So high, in fact ...

STEVEN TUCK: It takes several hours for that material to rain down fully.

LATIF: So most of it at this point is just hanging out up there in the air.

SARAH: Huh!

LATIF: Which means ...

STEVEN TUCK: If people looked at that and then said, "I think it's time to leave," they would have three, four hours to get out.

SARAH: Wait, I always thought that people got covered in ash instantly, like frozen in the middle of taking a bite at dinner or something. I mean, three to four hours sounds like a lot of time to leave.

STEVEN TUCK: Yes, but that assumes that people decided quickly.

LATIF: And the last time this mountain had exploded was 1,800 years before.

SARAH: Hmm.

LATIF: So nobody knew that this was a volcano. They didn't even have the word 'volcano' in the language.

SARAH: Oh my God!

LATIF: I mean, you don't really know what they were thinking. Maybe they thought the explosion was the worst of it. Maybe they thought that, you know, the stuff that kind of looks like smoke is just gonna blow away.

SARAH: Right.

LATIF: But even if you were like, "Okay, I'm getting out of here right now," just imagine maybe you were out running around town doing something.

STEVEN TUCK: Your family's at home.

LATIF: You have to get home first. But the sky is rapidly darkening, the earth is shaking.

STEVEN TUCK: You're trying to get through the chaos with the earthquake.

LATIF: Push your way through the people, the animals, the carts.

STEVEN TUCK: Trying to make it home and gather your family before you go.

LATIF: When you finally reach your house, maybe someone's missing. Maybe you have a sick relative who can't move so easily. You have no idea how much time you have. Who knows? There's a million different ways that this could play out.

SARAH: Yeah.

LATIF: But when archaeologists dug up some of the houses in Pompeii, they discovered a clue.

STEVEN TUCK: Every house would have at least a small shrine to the household gods.

LATIF: A little hollowed-out alcove in the wall where they keep these little statues.

STEVEN TUCK: They're mostly bronze figurines between six and nine inches tall.

LATIF: And the members of the household would pray at the shrine to protect the home, the family.

SARAH: Hmm.

LATIF: And when archaeologists uncovered these homes, they noticed ...

STEVEN TUCK: All the household shrines are empty.

LATIF: ... all these little statues are gone.

SARAH: Oh!

LATIF: And not only that, all of the safes that have been uncovered ...

STEVEN TUCK: Their strong boxes of money.

LATIF: ... those are empty, too.

SARAH: [gasps]

STEVEN TUCK: All of these things are gone from the houses.

SARAH: Wait, what does this mean?

LATIF: Well, it means that people were trying to just grab whatever was grabbable and get out of there. So in those three hours, you can imagine that people were out at their houses, maybe on foot or on horseback, dragging carts behind them, just trying to make their way through the crowded, chaotic streets. And the volcano, remember, is to the north, so you kind of can assume most people are trying to go south towards the southern city gates.

SARAH: Get a move on, people. No time to waste here.

LATIF: But ...

STEVEN TUCK: That material ...

LATIF: ... that tall column of debris that's been hanging in the air ...

STEVEN TUCK: Starts to collapse. And because of the prevailing winds coming from the northwest, it collapses towards the south, pushed over like a Jenga tower.

LATIF: Directly on top of the city of Pompeii.

STEVEN TUCK: The ash is filling the air. It's hard to breathe. You can't see anything. And then this pumice stone starts coming down. And then heavier volcanic glassy stones, and those are like missiles

LATIF: So all of this stuff kind of rains down. The streets fill up, become impossible to move through. And a lot of those people who did try to flee ...

STEVEN TUCK: If you map the human remains that have been discovered, the vast majority of them are clustered around the gates.

LATIF: ... they were caught in a traffic jam. And years later, recovered from their bodies were the little bronze statues of household gods.

LATIF: Huh.

SARAH: Okay, but Pompeii, it's a coastal city, right? Like, maybe a bunch of people left by sea? Because if it was me, I would try to get on a boat.

LATIF: Why would you try to get on a boat?

SARAH: I would assume that I could get farther away more quickly on a ship?

LATIF: Yeah.

SARAH: And if I don't know what's going on, the very least I know is that the problem is on land.

LATIF: Well, maybe.

SARAH: Oh God.

LATIF: So imagine there's a volcano. Imagine there's also earthquakes. So there are tsunamis happening here.

SARAH: Oh!

STEVEN TUCK: And those, they're disastrous.

LATIF: So this sea, this is not a calm sea.

STEVEN TUCK: And unless somebody left early or timed it perfectly so that they could flow out of the Bay of Naples with those waves going out, once those waves come back in, there's no sailing against them. They would be trapped.

SARAH: Ah, okay, okay. Maybe not by sea, then.

LATIF: Maybe not. Anyway, things just get worse from there. By dusk, the ash and rock had built up so much that it was impossible to leave.

STEVEN TUCK: Some people took refuge in their houses, but the volcanic material came down and the roofs collapsed.

LATIF: Those who managed to escape the collapsed roofs make their way through the darkness and the heat and the falling missiles, and ...

STEVEN TUCK: Took refuge in public buildings and in low areas like cellars.

LATIF: And it was around this time that the second phase of the eruption began with these pulses of super hot volcanic gas.

STEVEN TUCK: Estimates between 300 and 600 degrees.

LATIF: That's Celsius, which is 500 to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

SARAH: Wow!

LATIF: So hot that in one case in Herculaneum ...

STEVEN TUCK: They found evidence of gray matter that had been turned to glass.

SARAH: What?

LATIF: It got so hot that someone's brain turned to glass.

SARAH: What?

LATIF: Yeah.

LATIF: And these gasses roll down the mountain into the city.

STEVEN TUCK: And they're heavier than air, and they displace the oxygen, starting at the ground and moving up. So the people who are taking refuge in cellars or downstairs in houses are all asphyxiated. There's no way around that. You can't escape that.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I looked back. A dense, dark mist seemed to be following us, spreading itself over the country like a cloud.]

LATIF: The closest we can get to actually imagining what it would be like to be in Pompeii at that time comes from the letters of Pliny the Younger, an aristocrat, an author, a lawyer. Also a nephew to the naturalist Pliny the Elder.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: "Let us turn out of the high road," I said, "While we can still see, for fear that should we fall on the road, we should be pressed to death in the dark by the crowds that are following us."]

LATIF: He was a teenager at the time, and he watched Vesuvius erupt from across the Bay of Naples, a much safer distance than Pompeii. But still, he and his mother barely escaped with their lives.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: We had scarcely sat down when night came upon us. Not such as we have when the sky is cloudy or when there is no moon, but that of a room when it is shut up and all the lights put out. You might hear the shrieks of women, the screams of children and the shouts of men, some calling for their children, others for their parents, others for their husbands. And seeking to recognize each other by the voices that replied. One lamenting his own fate, another that of his family. Some wishing to die from the very fear of dying. Some lifting their hands to the gods, but the greater part convinced that there were now no gods at all, and that the final, endless night of which we have heard had come upon the world.]

SARAH: Wow. You know, I know Steven Tuck set out to, like, find people who survived, but all I'm hearing is the six million ways that they could have died.

LATIF: Which is what makes even more impressive what Steven Tuck found after the break.

LATIF: Latif.

SARAH: Sarah.

LATIF: Radiolab.

SARAH: Back from break.

LATIF: Okay, so before the break, we met Professor Steven Tuck, who is on a mission to try to find survivors from Pompeii, but who then told us how totally and hopelessly devastating the eruption of Vesuvius actually was.

SARAH: Right. I mean, it's the apocalypse, basically.

LATIF: It's the apocalypse.

SARAH: Yeah.

LATIF: But we also learned that there were these windows, these moments where it might have been possible to escape.

LATIF: Okay, so then what? Then—okay, so where do you go? What's your next step?

STEVEN TUCK: So my next step was trying to figure out how to find people, and I decided the way forward was Roman names.

LATIF: Family names in, you know, ancient Roman Empire, were very tied to place. And so Steve's plan was to look for Pompeiian names that kind of newly popped up in other cities after the eruption.

SARAH: Okay.

LATIF: That's his kind of strategy, which I think is like a pretty good strategy.

SARAH: Yeah. Wait, wait. Then how do you find the Pompeiian—like, are there old Pompeiian phone books or letters, or—I don't know. How do you, like, even find them?

LATIF: No, not really. Nothing like that. But the special thing about Pompeii is that unlike old ruins that have, you know, been weathered for 2,000 years, this city was basically preserved in ash. And so you can find names everywhere.

STEVEN TUCK: Oh, yes.

LATIF: They're in the usual places, carved into stone.

STEVEN TUCK: You know, epitaphs, tombstones.

LATIF: There were names carved above the doors of people's homes, like a name on a mailbox kind of thing.

SARAH: Right.

LATIF: Or on objects.

STEVEN TUCK: Seal rings that people had with their names on them.

LATIF: But also ...

STEVEN TUCK: Fortunately ...

LATIF: ... you can read names that were just written or scratched lightly on a wall.

STEVEN TUCK: Graffiti and painted announcements.

LATIF: People signed all that with their family names.

SARAH: Oh, nice.

LATIF: There were even receipts written on walls.

STEVEN TUCK: Loan records from banks.

LATIF: Filled with names.

STEVEN TUCK: You know, so and so agrees to borrow this much money, and will repay it at this rate of interest. And then nine witnesses have to sign off on those.

LATIF: Wow! And probably a lot of those loans did not—there was no volcano clause in there, I guess.

STEVEN TUCK: Yeah, I think a lot of those loans did not get repaid. Yeah, right.

LATIF: Right.

LATIF: Anyway, so what he does is he basically takes every ...

STEVEN TUCK: The Kaecilius family ...

LATIF: ... single ...

STEVEN TUCK: ... the Cornelius family ...

LATIF: ... name ...

STEVEN TUCK: ... the Vibidia family ...

LATIF: ... he can find ...

STEVEN TUCK: ... Secundus ...

LATIF: ... that has ever been excavated anywhere in this region.

STEVEN TUCK: Pompeiius is also a family name.

LATIF: Puts them in a big database. Does this for Pompeii and Herculaneum.

STEVEN TUCK: So I have a huge number of names.

LATIF: And he's like, "Okay, these are the people I'm looking for." And so he puts up a map on the wall of his office.

STEVEN TUCK: A very nice map that I made of the region.

LATIF: And of the roads, the Roman roads at the time.

STEVEN TUCK: All the roads that led away from Pompeii and Herculaneum.

LATIF: And he's like, "Okay, I'm gonna go through the neighboring towns and communities ...

STEVEN TUCK: There's thousands of communities.

LATIF: ... one by one." To see if he can find any of these names popping up after the eruption.

SARAH: Okay.

STEVEN TUCK: I started with the close cities.

LATIF: No survivors.

STEVEN TUCK: Nobody in Sorrento or Salerno.

LATIF: He looked at the town of Velia.

STEVEN TUCK: It's right on the coast. Everything you might want. Nobody at Velia either.

LATIF: He looked on the islands.

STEVEN TUCK: I thought some people might have gone to the islands of Capri or Ischia.

LATIF: But no.

STEVEN TUCK: Nothing.

LATIF: And, like, you can just imagine his finger, like, running down the map, following the road, crossing off this town, crossing off that town.

STEVEN TUCK: The whole Sorrentine Peninsula, which makes up the bottom half of the Bay of Naples.

LATIF: Yeah.

STEVEN TUCK: And it's outside the blast zone. Nobody in any of those communities.

LATIF: He tries moving inland, away from the coast.

STEVEN TUCK: Yeah, they're close. There's roads. There's connections to Pompeii in some of these communities.

LATIF: But were any Pompeiians there?

STEVEN TUCK: No.

LATIF: No.

STEVEN TUCK: City after city. Just nobody.

SARAH: This just keeps getting bleaker and bleaker!

LATIF: But then he thinks, "Okay, the town that would make the most sense is this one south of the Bay of Naples called Paestum."

STEVEN TUCK: And Paestum is a beautiful Roman port city. It's on the west coast, like Pompeii, like Herculaneum. It checked all my boxes.

LATIF: He's like, "This is the place."

STEVEN TUCK: It's everything that Pompeii is, but just outside the blast zone.

LATIF: He checks all the names in that town ...

STEVEN TUCK: And I found ...

SARAH: [gasps]

STEVEN TUCK: ... nobody.

SARAH: No!

LATIF: None of the Pompeii names.

STEVEN TUCK: Nobody from Pompeii, nobody from Herculaneum, nobody from any of the villas. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. There's just nobody.

SARAH: Oh!

LATIF: And as time went on ...

STEVEN TUCK: As I spent weeks or months doing research with no results, you know, I thought, okay, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe—maybe everyone did die.

SARAH: Wow! Now I'm, like, so sad about this.

LATIF: Okay, just wait. Just wait.

SARAH: Okay.

LATIF: Because this whole time, Steve had mostly been looking in communities south of Pompeii.

STEVEN TUCK: You know, Vesuvius is on the north side of the city.

LATIF: So he assumed that people in Pompeii ...

STEVEN TUCK: They look at the eruption and they flee south.

LATIF: Which makes sense. But ...

STEVEN TUCK: When that eruptive column collapsed, the one that was 20 miles into the sky, when that collapsed, it collapsed to the southeast.

LATIF: So it's possible that if anyone tried to flee that way, they would have been killed by that collapse. In any case, Steve runs out of south, so he looks north towards this big city.

STEVEN TUCK: Puteoli, which is north of Vesuvius. It's the major harbor city for ancient Italy, and it's the largest community outside of Rome.

LATIF: And as he starts to go through all the names in this city, he comes across a clue in the shape of a bottle.

SAMIN NOSRAT: Are you ready?

LATIF: Yeah, I think so.

LATIF: A bottle that used to hold something called garum or garum.

SAMIN NOSRAT: The word "garum," it just, like, tickles my soul.

LATIF: This is Samin Nosrat.

SAMIN NOSRAT: I'm a cook. And a nerd.

LATIF: Author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, and ancient Rome enthusiast.

SAMIN NOSRAT: I'm a nerd cook.

LATIF: And she graciously agreed to help us make some garum.

SAMIN NOSRAT: I've always kind of wanted to make a pot of ...

LATIF: Sardines, check.

SAMIN NOSRAT: Stinky stuff.

LATIF: I'm really enjoying this.

SAMIN NOSRAT: [laughs]

SARAH: Wait. Okay, what is garum? Why is it a clue? What does it have to do with Pompeii and bottles?

LATIF: Great questions.

SARAH: And why are you all of a sudden cooking with Samin?

LATIF: Okay. I promise I'm gonna get to that.

SARAH: Okay.

LATIF: Okay. Okay, so when Steve was collecting Pompeiian names, there was one he came across more than any other, which was this guy named Aulus Umbricius Scaurus.

SARAH: Ooh!

STEVEN TUCK: Aulus Umbricius Scaurus is the garum king of Pompeii. He is the king of the fish sauce manufacturers.

LATIF: He had workshops all over Pompeii where they would bottle this condiment ...

LATIF: These are crunchy!

LATIF: ... made from fresh sardines.

SAMIN NOSRAT: Yeah, I think you want exposed guts.

LATIF: Chopped into pieces.

LATIF: Your cutting board looks like you have ...

SAMIN NOSRAT: Covered in blood.

LATIF: ... butchered a person.

SAMIN NOSRAT: Place fish guts in a vase. I'm mushing up fish heads, fish blood, fish scales. You put a ton of salt on there.

LATIF: That was pretty easy.

SAMIN NOSRAT: And then you leave this whole jar in the sun ...

LATIF: Stirring multiple times a day.

SAMIN NOSRAT: ... to rot.

LATIF: And over time, the fish and salt ooze out this brown liquid. And because most ancient Romans ate pretty plain food ...

STEVEN TUCK: Bread, or some kind of grain and simple vegetables.

LATIF: Garum and this guy, Aulus Umbricius Scaurus's garum in particular ...

STEVEN TUCK: It's salty and fishy.

SAMIN NOSRAT: You only need, like, a few drops, man.

LATIF: ... people would just buy it by the bottle and put it on everything.

SAMIN NOSRAT: I think it was truly, like, the condiment on the table at all times.

LATIF: And when archaeologists began to dig up Pompeii, these bottles were found all over the place.

LATIF: Can you describe the bottle and the label?

STEVEN TUCK: So the bottles are very plain terracotta bottles.

LATIF: Okay.

STEVEN TUCK: They've got a very narrow neck and a rounded body, and then a narrow, round foot at the bottom.

LATIF: Hmm. Okay.

STEVEN TUCK: But then across that sort of globular body was handwritten in ink—some of it's black, some of it's red—the labeling. And the labeling formula was always "The Flower of Garum," which is a little hyperbolic. "The Flower of Garum of Scaurus."

LATIF: "The Flower of Garum of Scaurus."

LATIF: All these bottles had these words.

SARAH: This is like Mike's Hot Honey, but like ...

LATIF: It's exactly Mike's Hot Honey.

SARAH: Yeah.

STEVEN TUCK: It's like the Heinz ketchup of antiquity.

LATIF: And actually, this is, so far as we know, the first example of, like, a product with brand labeling in history.

SARAH: Whoa!

LATIF: This fish sauce ...

SARAH: In history?

LATIF: Yeah.

STEVEN TUCK: And these garum bottles ...

LATIF: They were a favorite outside of Pompeii, as well.

STEVEN TUCK: They're found as far away as southern France.

LATIF: Huh! It's like an empire.

STEVEN TUCK: It is. it is, yeah.

LATIF: But of course, August 24, 79 AD, along with the rest of Pompeii, Aulus Umbricius Scaurus's home and all his garum workshops are buried in ash and stone. And just like that, the production lines for this famous fish sauce stop dead. No more bottles shipped to southern France. You couldn't find it in Naples, in Rome. No fish sauce bottles anywhere to be found post 79 AD. It was just one more casualty of Vesuvius.

SARAH: Hmm.

LATIF: But then, as Steve is digging around in documents from Puteoli looking for Pompeiian names, he discovers that ...

STEVEN TUCK: About 20 years after the eruption ...

LATIF: ... there's a new product on the market in the town of Puteoli.

SARAH: Okay?

STEVEN TUCK: Bottles exactly like the bottles that Scaurus had used at Pompeii.

LATIF: And this one has weirdly similar branding.

STEVEN TUCK: It's the same labeling formula.

LATIF: In black or red ink.

STEVEN TUCK: It says, "The Flower of Garum of Puteolanus."

SARAH: Puteolanus. What's Puteolanus?

LATIF: Puteolanus just means "The guy from Puteoli."

STEVEN TUCK: The man from Puteoli.

SARAH: Hmm. So it's like a guy from Puteoli that's making this stuff?

LATIF: Yeah.

SARAH: I mean, it sounds like a rip off. It's like somebody that's capitalizing on this brand that people used to love and is hearkening back to that.

LATIF: Yeah. So it could be, right? Could be that someone's ripping off this guy's branding.

SARAH: Yeah.

STEVEN TUCK: No.

SARAH: No?

LATIF: No. Because as Steve continues to dig for names, he comes across an epitaph.

STEVEN TUCK: A group epitaph.

LATIF: And ...

SARAH: And?

LATIF: And guess what family he finds?

SARAH: Oh my God, the Aulus ...

LATIF: The Umbriciuses.

SARAH: The Aulus Umbriciuses.

LATIF: That's right!

STEVEN TUCK: Survivors.

SARAH: Wow!

STEVEN TUCK: And it's like, yes, there's somebody. There's somebody someplace.

SARAH: Wow!

LATIF: So that Aulus Umbricius Scaurus guy ...

STEVEN TUCK: He doesn't seem to have made it out, but his family did. And one of the young men ...

LATIF: Probably Scaurus's grandson.

STEVEN TUCK: ... is named Puteolanus.

LATIF: Like, they named him after their new hometown. And he grows up to become ...

STEVEN TUCK: The Garum King of Puteoli.

LATIF: Succession of the fish sauce kingdom.

SARAH: The new heir, yeah. [laughs]

LATIF: And now that he's looking in towns north of Vesuvius, Steve starts finding survivors all over the place.

STEVEN TUCK: Six people in the little city of Nuceria.

LATIF: A person in Aquinum. Two people in Beneventum.

STEVEN TUCK: A little cluster of five or six people ...

LATIF: Over here.

STEVEN TUCK: A couple dozen ...

LATIF: Over there.

STEVEN TUCK: Three families that moved to this small community in the mountains.

LATIF: There were three merchant families.

STEVEN TUCK: They all made it out to Puteoli.

LATIF: Two families who owned private banks.

STEVEN TUCK: Both settled at Cumae.

LATIF: He found rich people, poor people.

STEVEN TUCK: Some of them had been well off at Pompeii and desperately poor later on.

LATIF: There's one story of a woman ...

STEVEN TUCK: She makes it out also to Puteoli.

LATIF: ... who marries a gladiator.

STEVEN TUCK: Called Aquarius. He's a water-themed gladiator.

LATIF: Whoa!

STEVEN TUCK: Yeah.

LATIF: He even finds this whole neighborhood in the city of Naples ...

STEVEN TUCK: Built just for the people from Herculaneum.

LATIF: Like it's like Chinatown or something, but it's like Little Herculaneum.

SARAH: Oh!

LATIF: The map he made just filled in with all this life.

STEVEN TUCK: These people suffered tragedies. They became refugees. They fled. They moved into these new communities. You know, they named their kids after their new communities. They make religious dedications. They run for public office, they establish businesses. You know, they really just pick up.

SARAH: I love that!

LATIF: Yeah.

SARAH: Okay, so all in all, how many people did he find?

LATIF: Well, it took him 10 years to comb through the names in 48 communities.

SARAH: Okay.

STEVEN TUCK: And I found survivors in 12 of the 48.

LATIF: So in total ...

STEVEN TUCK: A couple hundred named individuals.

SARAH: Okay. Which I mean, wow. People even survived.

LATIF: Yeah.

SARAH: But then—sorry, not to burst your bubble.

LATIF: No, not at all. Bust it.

SARAH: But that leaves, what, like, 48,000 people that are still unaccounted for?

LATIF: That's right. But what he sort of slowly started to realize is, like ...

STEVEN TUCK: Well, let's say my house gets destroyed in, I don't know, a volcanic eruption today. I'm gonna go move into my parents' basement.

LATIF: I'm going to where my relatives are, right? Like, I'm going to where there's a couch I can crash on, where there's a roof I can say under.

STEVEN TUCK: You know, you go where they have to take you in, right?

LATIF: Like, that's probably most people's first impulse, right? Is to find family, find relatives somewhere else.

STEVEN TUCK: And so those people are invisible in the inscriptions because they have the same family name. They don't change the profile of a community.

LATIF: Right. Right.

STEVEN TUCK: It's not a new family name moving into a community. And I think that's where the vast majority of the people went.

LATIF: Now what he believes is ...

STEVEN TUCK: Most people got out.

LATIF: ... the majority of people survived. And almost always with their families.

SARAH: Wow!

LATIF: I do find it just so tantalizing. Like, it makes you just want to know the rest of the story. Like, what happened to those people? How did they get out?

STEVEN TUCK: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I would love to know some of these details of what happened between the eruption and people resettling somewhere.

LATIF: Yeah.

STEVEN TUCK: You know, what routes did they take? What occurred? You know, what traumas did they undergo on the way out? It must have been just a terrifying experience. And we simply don't know. But we know people went back for their families. You know, they went through the dark, shouting their names at each other, as Pliny tells us in his letter. And they connected up, and only then did they flee. I don't know. I find it quite moving. Yeah.

LATIF: So that's—yeah, that's the story. What do you—what do you make of that?

SARAH: You know, so my family's Pakistani. Like, I grew up in the US, my parents grew up in Pakistan.

LATIF: Mm-hmm.

SARAH: My grandparents grew up in India.

LATIF: Yeah.

SARAH: And, like, you know, the partition of India was like this giant traumatic thing that, like, I don't think my family really even has its arms around, like, all the ways in which it impacted us. But, like, there's so much that gets lost in a big, traumatic move like that, and I feel so cut off from even just like the lives that my grandparents had in India that, like, I would kill for anything like who they were hanging out with and what they were doing and, you know, any crumb is like gold.

LATIF: Yeah.

SARAH: Yeah.

LATIF: I mean, and that's—that's basically why I ended up making that fish sauce with Samin.

SARAH: Hmm.

LATIF: I mean, really what we're doing is we're time traveling.

SAMIN NOSRAT: Yeah. I mean, that's what I think is so magical about food.

LATIF: Again, Chef Samin Nosrat.

SAMIN NOSRAT: I mean, even in the span of your own life, you eat stuff and you travel back to, like, the first time you had it, or some really meaningful time you had it. And so this is another way that we get to go have a sensory experience that people were having, you know, 2,000 years ago.

LATIF: That time we almost died from a volcano.

SAMIN NOSRAT: Exactly.

LATIF: But it's true that I can't—like, I can't stop imagining it's just one day out of the blue. No warning, boom! You lose your home—not just your home, you lose your entire hometown. You can never go back to it. You can never walk down the streets you walked on as a kid. And then 20 years later, you're resettled in a totally new place, totally new life. And you're grocery shopping, and you see on the shelf, The Flower of Garum. And you buy it and you take it home. You open the bottle, and you taste it.

LATIF: Okay. All right.

SAMIN NOSRAT: Okay, are we opening it?

LATIF: Okay, let's open it on three.

SAMIN NOSRAT: Okay.

LATIF: One, two, three.

[lid pops]

LATIF: Wow! Oh, wow! This is smelling stronger than it was.

SAMIN NOSRAT: [laughs]

LATIF: Ugh! Okay.

SAMIN NOSRAT: I went real deep. I went nose into the jar.

LATIF: Okay.

SAMIN NOSRAT: Whoo!

LATIF: Oh, boy! Okay.

SAMIN NOSRAT: Whew.

LATIF: Okay, we ready?

SAMIN NOSRAT: I'm ready. I'm ready. I'm ready.

LATIF: Okay, I'm putting some on my tongue right now.

SAMIN NOSRAT: Okay.

LATIF: Um! Oh, it's very—I mean, it's very salty.

SAMIN NOSRAT: It's not really that gross.

LATIF: It's not that gross, no, no, no. It just tastes salty.

SAMIN NOSRAT: It tastes a little like umami. It's like a—you know, like, sometimes you're playing in the water as a kid at the beach?

LATIF: Yeah. That's right.

SAMIN NOSRAT: And a huge wave comes. And then—and then, like, it knocks you over, and you're losing your breath and you have to swallow some water? [laughs]

LATIF: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

SAMIN NOSRAT: And you're like, "Oh!" And you're like, "Why?"

LATIF: This episode was reported by me, Latif Nasser, with help from Annie McEwen and Ekedi Fausther-Keeys. It was produced by Annie McEwen. My culinary shenanigans with Samin were recorded by Adam Howell. Voice acting by Brendan Dalton. Original music and sound design by Jeremy Bloom. Hosting help from Sarah Qari. Fact-checked by Emily Krieger. Edited by Pat Walters.

LATIF: And I doubt anyone's gonna want to try it, but we're gonna link to the recipe for garum. And I also have a giant jar of it in my house that I'm trying to get rid of. Before we go, before we sign off here, real quick at the end I just wanted to shout out a podcast I've loved for many, many years, and it feels right to promote it at the end of this particular episode of ours because it is a podcast about history, about science, but more than anything, about food. It's called Gastropod. It's so charming, but also encyclopedic about food history. So for example, I just had the question: has Gastropod done an episode about garum? And of course they have. It's in their episode about the history of ketchup, which I probably shouldn't have but I just took 45 minutes out of the middle of my workday to relisten to it, and it was so good!

LATIF: Did you know, for example, that way before anyone ever thought to put a tomato in ketchup, it was a fermented fish sauce? Whatever condiment or snack or dessert or ingredient that you love, there's probably a Gastropod about it. One of my favorite all-time episodes of theirs, "Better Believe It's Butter," is about the margarine wars. Don't just take my word for it. The New York Times, Wired, TEDTalks, all of them have chosen Gastropod as one of their favorite podcasts. Yeah, so subscribe to Gastropod wherever you get your podcasts.

LATIF: That's it for us. Thank you so much for listening.

LATIF: Guys, I'm shaking the fish sauce. Who wants to help me? Okay, so no one's helping me shake this fish sauce? Shaking shaking shaking shaking shaking shaking shaking. Do you wanna shake it with me? Why not? Oh, come on now! It's not gross! Come here! Okay, look. I'm taking a little smell. Oh!

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Danielle, and I'm in beautiful Glover, Vermont, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Ellie from Cleveland, Ohio. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

 

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