Salt

Why I Read This Book

I bought this book many years ago to get free shipping on an Amazon order and it sat unread on my bookshelf for a long time. I don’t remember where I heard “Salt” was a good book, but I assume it was somewhere on Reddit. Looking for a change of pace after reading “Words That Work,” I finally picked “Salt” off the shelf figuring a food history book would be a fun read.

Should You Read This Book?

Yes.

Especially if you are looking for a lighter read. I don’t read much on vacation, but if I did, “Salt” is the type of book I would reach for.

Reading “Salt” is like reading a dozen New Yorker articles about salt or salt-adjacent subjects back to back. It’s a historical would tour of salt, salt products, and the peoples and cultures that produced them. This is far more interesting than it sounds. Salt is common and cheap today, but that wasn’t the case throughout most of history. Before refrigeration, salt was the primary means of preserving food. Salt production was slow, backbreaking, and dangerous work; this made it rare and valuable. Salt was used as currency, wars were fought over salt, and salt access or lack thereof drove civilizations to riches or ruin.

“Salt” is a fascinating read. But around page 350 you may think: wow, this is a lot of information about salt — and yet you’ll still have 100 pages left to go. You may think this is too much salt. But keep reading. In a few pages, you’ll hit the next chapter, be dropped into another place and time, and quickly wrapped up in the next salt story.

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Commonplace

[The Confucians] when asked how a state should raise profits, replied, “Why must Your Majesty use the word profit? All I am concerned with are the good and the right. If Your Majesty says, ‘How can I profit my state?’ Your officials will say, ‘How can I profit my family?’ And officers and common people will say, ‘How can I profit myself?’ Once superiors and inferiors are competing for profit, the state will be in danger.”

The Romans… called them Galli or Gauls, also coming from a Greek word, used by the Egyptians as well, Hal, meaning “salt.” They were the salt people.

To the pig-loving Celts, the leg of wild boar was considered the choicest piece of meat and was reserved for the warriors… It is likely that among the Celtic contributions to Western culture are the first salt-cured hams.

After the Roman campaigns were over, all that remained of Celtic life were isolated groups on the far Atlantic coasts… All of these groups were treated by the chroniclers of later-nation states as recalcitrant people interfering of great states—Britain, France, or Spain.

The Latin word sal became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier.

The Romans salted their greens, believing this to counteract the nature bitterness, which is the origin of the word salad, salted.

The Romans preserved many vegetables in brine, sometimes with the addition of vinegar, including fennel, asparagus, and cabbage.

In Vietnam salt is so appreciated that poor people sometimes make a meal of nothing more than rice and a salt blend, either salt and chili powder or the more expensive salt with ground grilled sesame seeds.

The Romans used garum (a fermented fish sauce) in much the same way that the Chinese used soy sauce. Rather than sprinkling salt on a dish, a few drops of garum would be added to meat, fish, vegetables, or even fruit.

After the fall of Rome in the fifth century, garum was often thought of as just one of the unpleasant hedonistic excesses for which Rome was remembered. Leaving fish organs in the sun was not an idea that endured in less extravagant cultures. Of course when garum was made properly, the salt prevented rotting until fermentation took hold. But it became increasingly difficult to convince people of this.

The Venetians made an important discovery. More money could be made buying and selling salt than producing it.

No state had based its economy on salt to the degree Venice had or established as extensive a state salt policy except China.

The Po Valley, where butter is preferred to olive oil, is Italy’s only important diary region.

The difference between fresh cheese and aged cheese is salt. Italians call the curds that are eaten fresh before they begin to turn sour, ricotta, and it is made all over the peninsula in much the same way. But once salt is added, once cheese makers cure their product in brine to prevent spoilage and allow for aging, then each cheese is different.

The one thing the Parma dairies produced very little of was and still is milk. Just as the Egyptians millennia before had learned that it was more profitable to make salt fish than sell salt, the people in the Po determined that selling diary products was far more profitable than selling milk.

It became a requirement of prosciutto di Parma that it be made from pigs that had been fed the whey from Parmesan cheese.

After the fifteenth century the Mediterranean ceased to be the center of the Western world, and Venice’s location was no longer advantageous. Yet it stubbornly held to its independence and so declined with the Mediterranean.

Under English law the penalty for eating meat on Friday was hanging.

Atlantic Cod… this large bottom feeder preserves unusually well because its white flesh is almost entirely devoid of fat.

“Salt cod that has been too little soaked is too salty; that which has soaked too long is not good. Because of this you must, as soon as you buy it, put it to the test of your teeth, and taste a little bit.”

Until the sixteenth-century cod boom, La Rochelle had been a minor port because it was not on a river. But suddenly, riverless La Rochelle, because it was an Atlantic port near the Ile de Ré saltworks, became the leading Newfoundland fishing port of Europe.

The Breton fishing ports also had a salt advantage. Salt was heavily taxed in France, but in order to bring the Celtic duchy of Brittany into the French kingdom, France had offered the peninsula an exemption from the hated gabelle, the French salt tax.

Irish corned beef became a staple in Pacific Islands visited by the British navy, where it is called keg.

By the fourteenth century, for most of northern Europe the standard procedure to prepare for war was to obtain a large quantity of salt and start salting fish and meat.

The provisions necessary to withstand a long siege were herring, eels, bream, and cod — all salted.

The salt intake of Europeans, much of it in the form of salted fish, rose from forty gams a day per person in the sixteenth century to seventy grams in the eighteenth century.

For both meat and fish, smoking was a northern solution to a lack of salt. Salt is needed for smoking but in smaller quantities because the smoking aids in conservation.

[Surströmming (made from Baltic herring)] these potent little fish have always been shrouded in controversy because, like Roman garum, they flirtatiously hover between fermented and rotten… In recent years, a Swedish company tried to import surströmming to the United States, but the U.S. government refused it entry on the grounds that it was rotten.

Charles de Gaulle, explaining the ungovernable character of the French nation, said, “Nobody can easily bring together a nation that has 265 kinds of cheese.”

French kingdoms were set with huge, ornate nefs, ships, in this case jeweled vessels holding salt.

[In France] placing salt on the table was a rich man’s luxury.

The medieval French, like the Chinese, believed that the presence of women could be destructive to fermentation. In France, a menstruating women is said to be en salaison, curing in salt. It was dangerous to have a women in a room full of fermenting food when she herself was in fermentation.

Surkrut was a dish for special occasions—weddings and state banquets.

In Paris [surkrut/sauerkraut/choucroute] remained a banquet food for the royal court. Marie Antoinette, whose father was from the house of Lorraine championed choucroute at court.

When the anchovies were ripe, the color of the meat around the bones was a deep pink… and the brine… turned pink. Unscrupulous anchovy makers dyed their brine pink.

Anglo Saxons called saltworks a wich, and any place in England where the name ends in ‘wich’ at one time produced salt.

In the Middle Ages, yellow flowers of various species were salted and kept in earthen pots and beaten to extract a juice to color butter that had lost its carotene. Later, after Columbus’s voyages annatto seeds were used. These seeds are still used by large American dairies, not to conceal rancid butter but because they believe the consumer wants a consistent dark yellow color.

Lent aside, butter was a cheap food and was more popular with the poor than the rich.

Ketchup derives its name from the Indonesian fish and soy sauce kecap ikan… which means a base of dark, thick soy sauce.

Many English condiments, even Worcestershire sauce, invented in the 1840’s are based on Asian ideas.

The British navy was provisioned with salt and salt foods. Salt was strategic, like gunpowder, which was also made from salt.

North American cod seemed limitless, and the only impediments to British profits were the number of ships and fisherman, and the supply of salt.

Studying a road of almost anywhere in North America, nothing the whimsical non-geometric pattern of the secondary roads, the local roads, the map reader could reasonably assume that the towns were placed and interconnected haphazardly without any scheme or design. That is because the roads are simply widened footpaths and trails, and these trails were originally cut by animals looking for salt.

The Dutch gave incentives to colonists and, in 1660, granted a colonist the right to build a saltworks on a small island near New Amsterdam, known as Coney Island.

Though they accepted the royal name Cape Ann, they used Smith’s name for Cape Cod, a name originated by his fellow Jamestown founder, Bartholomew Gosnold, because they intended, like Smith to amass wealth from fishing.

When … early settlers hunted, they would leave red herring along their trail because the strong smell would confuse wolves, which is the origin of the expression… “a false trail.”

Comte de Rochambeau… while engaged in the Virginia campaign said that French ham “cannot be compared to the quality and taste of [Virginia].”

[In France] to enforce the law against suicide, it was ordered that the bodies of people who took their own lives be salted, brought before a judge, and sentenced to public display.

[The Paris region] with only one third of the French population, who used only a quarter of the French salt, and yet how paid two-thirds of the state’s salt revenue, the residents of this region were the angriest people in France.

By the late eighteenth century, more than 3,000 French men, women, and even children were sentenced to prison or death every year for crimes against the gabelle [salt tax].

Novelist Honoré de Balzac… [said the salt producing parts of Brittany] “was something a traveler could see nowhere else in France.” He compared the area to Africa, and in the age of French colonialism, many followed, comparing the impoverished Breton paludiers to Tuaregs, Arabs, and Asians.

The salt cuisine of Brittany showed its poverty… Brittany was one of the first potato-eating parts of France.

The gabelle remained a part of French administration until it was finally abolished in the newly liberated France of 1946.

The [Erie Canal and Oswego Canal] intersected in the center of the town of Syracuse. With its torch-lit bridges over reflecting canals, Syracuse became known as the “American Venice.”

The [Union blockage of the Confederacy] caused shortages and accompanying high prices… In 1864, potatoes cost $2.25 a bushel in the North and $25 a bushel in the Richmond.

In 1841, New Orleans was the third largest city in the United States… dominated by the descendants of French and Spanish settlers, [Anglo immigrants] were called “Americans.”

In much of the South, the Caribbean, and Mexico [hot peppers and salt] constituted a hot sauce. But the New Orleans tradition called for vinegar. (Referring to why Tabasco has vinegar).

Darwin wrote of the complex ecology of sea saltworks where single-celled algae lived in brine and turned it green, but at a denser level, tiny shrimp and worms turned it red, and these reddish animals attracted flamingos, which turned pink from eating them.

Today, the amount of nitrates is limited by law to what seems to have been deemed an acceptable risk for the oddly unquestioned goal of making ham reddish.

Birdseye [founder of the modern frozen food industry] once said, “I do not consider myself a remarkable person. I am just a guy with a very large bump of curiosity and a gambling instinct.”

Fast freezing and at last made the unsalted fish people wanted, available to everyone, even far inland. Soon fishing vessels, instead of salting their catch at sea, were freezing it on board. Most salted foods became delicacies instead of necessities.

Because salt is impenetrable, organic material gets trapped next to the salt and slowly decomposes into oil and gas. For this reason, oil, gas, or both are frequently found on the edge of salt.

In a less corporate age, oil men used to take glee in pointing out that the three most important discoveries in the history of American oil—Titusville, Spindletop, and the East Texas Field— were all drilled against the advice of geologists.

Many artisans have been faced with the choice of whether to industrialize or remain a small shop. But at a certain point that choice can be lost. If the operations becomes too unprofitable, it will no longer be able to attract the investment needed to modernize.

Chinese proverb: “Governing a state is like cooking small fish. It has to be done with a very light touch.”

[East Indian Company] Customs officers were given that always disastrous combination of broad powers and low pay. 

Labour members warned [the British government] that the salt tax could be leading them into another Irish situation in India.

[Ghandi] despite his enduring reputation for living a life of simplicity and self-denial, he did not come to this easily… he experimented with meat eating, hoping it would make him large and strong like the carnivorous English.

[Ghandi] was struck by Thoreau’s assertion: “The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”

[Ghandi’s] quiet self-assurance made a man of constant surprises… When World War I broke out, this pacifist who fought British colonialism announced his support for the British war effort… Just when he appeared to be denouncing the Industrial Revolution and its machinery, he suddenly confessed his affection for Singer sewing machines.

Ghandi argued [the British salt tax in India] was an example of British misrule that touched the lives of all castes of Indians. Everyone ate salt he argued.

[Dead Sea] water is 26 percent dissolved minerals, 99 percent of which are salts. This concentration is striking when compared to the oceans’ typical mineral concentration of about 3 percent.

This desert by a sea too salty to sustain life has attracted the margins of society. They have huddled along its life-giving springs: the adventurers, the dreamers, the fanatics, and the zealots. Many biblical references to going off “into the wilderness” allude to this area.

In February 1912, ancient China came to an end when the last of three millennia of Chinese emperors abdicated. Imagine twentieth-century Italy coming to terms with the fall of the Roman Empire or Egypt with the last pharaoh abdicating in 1912.

Unique to Sichuan, ma is the spicy flavor of a wild tree peppercorn called huajiao—with a taste between peppercorn, caraway, and clove, but so strong that too much will numb the mouth. Two varieties grow in Sichuan, clay red peppercorns and the more perfume brown ones. La means “hot spice” and is accomplished with small burning red peppers. The combined seasoning, ma-la, defines the taste of Sichuan food.

In China, the more obscure the ingredients and the more arcane the method, the more status a dish has.

[In China] buses were built with giant gray bladders on the roofs, filled with the local natural gas. They started out on their routes with huge rectangular bladder on top almost as big as the bus. The bladder swayed and jiggled like Jell-O as the bus rounded corners, and then it gradually deflated, the gray bag sagging from the room, as the gas was used up.

Sichuan province is the size of France with twice the population.

Iodized salt has become controversial in developing countries where government control of salt is a historic issue… Impurities are things that are left in, and many prefer this to chemicals that are added. The controversy over iodized salt is in part the distrust of chemical additives that have become part of life in virtually all cultures.

In China, southern food, especially Cantonese, is usually said to be the best. But after 1949, when Mao Zedong from Hunan and Den Xiaoping from Sichuan came to power, the hot spicy food, la, from southwestern China, came into official fashion. “If you don’t eat la, you are not a revolutionary” became a popular saying.

The six [balancing principles of Sichuan food are] “ma, la, tian, sun, xian, ku” [or spicy huajiao, hot peppers, sweet, sour, salty, and bitter].

Salty and spicy, xian-la, is [a popular Sichuan combination and] a recurring theme in other warm climates from Cajun Louisiana to Vietnam, where ground hot pepper and salt are served on limes, grapefruit, or pineapple to moderate the acid taste.

[The Sichuan idea] of using sweet as a countermeasure to salty or spicy used to be common in the West… But in the eighteenth century, dessert, a word from the French verb meaning, “to clear the plates,” became such an elaborate showpiece in Europe that sweet was gradually eliminated from the rest of the meal.

“Sugar brings out the saltiness of salt.” … Sugar in salt is a leitmotif of Swedish cooking. There is even a Swedish word for it, socker-saltad, sugar salting, which is also the first ingredient listed on many labels.

Bacon and salted beef remain popular but, because they are now refrigerated, are no longer so salted that they need to be soaked before using.

In the nineteenth century, American rivers had sturgeon. Caviar was served as a free bar snack, in the hope that as with peanuts, the saltiness would encourage drinking. During World War I, British solders were fed cans of pressed caviar, which they called “fish jam” and mostly loathed.

During the twentieth century, as industrial pollution and oil spills killed off sturgeon around the world, commercial caviar fishing was largely reduced to the Caspian Sea.

The prices of caviar from the three varieties—beluga, ossetra, and sevruga—are not a reflection of quality but rather the rarity of the fish.

Capers are the [flower] buds of Capparis spinosa… the buds must be picked before they being to open, which requires daily harvest in the summer and careful examination of each bud.

The salt fish trade has undergone a historical reversal. With the once precious salt crystals so common they are dumped onto roads, today there is a scarcity of tuna, anchovies, herring, Great Lakes carp, Caspian caviar, even cod.

Many people do not like Morton’s idea of making all salt the same. Uniformity was a remarkable innovation in its day, but it was so successful that today consumers seem to be excited by any salt that is different.