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SALT ~ SAL ~ SALE ~ זאַלץ ~ SůL ~ SARE

Sea Salt ~ A full mineral and trace mineral oceanic complex compound, sourced from the Atlantic through the traditional solar evaporation method.

A brief history

"Water and a balanced salt is your best bet to keeping healthy and hydrated."

"It is very important you balance your sodium intake with your water consumption. Take 1/4 teaspoon of sea salt per quart of water - every 4-5 glasses of water. Be sure to get sea salt."

Dr Fereydoon Batmanghelidj, M.D

CHINESE SALT HISTORY begins with the mythical Huangdi, who invented writing, weaponry, and transportation. According  to the legends, he also had the distinction of presiding over the first war ever fought over salt.

One of the earliest verifiable saltworks in prehistoric China was in the northern province of Shanxi. In this arid region of dry yellow earth and desert mountains is a lake of salty water, Lake Yuncheng. This area was known for constant warfare, and all of the wars were over control of the lake. Chinese historians are certain that by 6000 B.C., each year, when the lake’s  waters  evaporated  in the  summer sun, people harvested the square crystals on the surface of the water, a system the Chinese referred to as “dragging and gathering.” Human bones found around the lake have been dated much earlier, and some historians speculate that these inhabitants may also have gathered salt from the lake.

The earliest  written record  of salt  production  in China  dates  to around    800 B.C . and tells  of  production  and trade  of  sea  salt  a millennium before, during the Xia dynasty. It is not known if the techniques described in this account were actually used during the Xia dynasty, but they were considered old ways by the time of this account, which describes putting ocean water in clay vessels and boiling it until reduced  to  pots  of salt  crystals.  This  was the  technique  that was spread through southern Europe by the Roman Empire, 1,000 years after the Chinese account was written.

About  1000 B.C., iron first came into use in China, though the first evidence of it being used in salt making is not until 450 B.C. by a man named Yi Dun. According to a passage written in 129 B.C. , “Yi Dun rose to prominence by producing salt in pans.” Yi Dun is believed to have made salt by boiling brine in iron pans, an innovation which would become one of the leading  techniques  for salt making  for the next

2,000  years.  The legend  says that he worked  with an ironmaster named Guo Zong and was also friendly with an enterprising wealthy bureaucrat  named Fan Li.  Fan Li  is  credited  with inventing  fish farming, which for centuries after was associated with salt-producing areas. The Chinese, like later Europeans, saw that salt and fish were partners.  Many Chinese,  including  Mencius,  the famous  Confucian thinker  who lived  from  372 to  289 B.C., were  said  to have worked selling both fish and salt.

THROUGHOUT THE LONG history of China, sprinkling salt directly on food has been a rarity. Usually it has been added during cooking by means of  various  condiments—salt-based  sauces and pastes.  The usual explanation is that salt was expensive and it was stretched by these condiments. A recurring idea throughout the ancient world from the Mediterranean to Southeast Asia, fish fermented in salt was one of the most popular salt condiments in ancient China. It was called jiang. But in China soybeans were added  to ferment with the fish, and in time the fish was dropped  altogether  from the recipe and jiang became jiangyou, or, as it is called in the West, soy sauce.

Soy is a legume that produces beans, two or three in a two-inch-long furry pod. The beans can be yellow, green, brown, purple, black, or spotted, and Chinese cooking makes a great distinction among these varieties. Jiangyou is made from yellow beans, but other types are also fermented  with salt to produce different pastes and condiments. In China, the earliest written mention of soy is in the sixth century B.C., describing the plant as a 700-year-old crop from the north. Soy was brought  to  Japan from  China  in the  sixth  century A.D . by Chinese Buddhist   missionaries.   Both   the   religion   and  the   bean  were successfully implanted. But the Japanese did not make soy sauce until the  tenth  century.  Once they  did  learn,  they  called  it shoyu and industrialized it and sold it around  the world.

Though jiangyou a nd shoyu are  pronounced  very differently and appear to be very different words in Western writing, the two words are written with the  same character  in Japanese and Chinese.  Mao’s 1950s  literacy  campaign  simplified  the  language  to  some 40,000 characters, but a pre-Mao character for the soy plant, su, depicts little roots at the bottom which revive the soil. Soy puts nutrients back into the soil and can restore  fields  that have been exhausted  by other crops. The bean is so nutritious that a person could be sustained for a considerable period on nothing but water, soy, and salt.

THE PROCESS BY which the Chinese, and later the Japanese, fermented beans in earthen pots is today known as lactic acid fermentation, or, in more common jargon, pickling. Optimum lactic fermentation takes place between sixty-four and seventy-one degrees Fahrenheit, which in most of the world is an easily achieved environment.

As vegetables begin to rot, the sugars break down and produce lactic acid, which serves as a preservative. Theoretically, pickling can be accomplished without salt, but the carbohydrates and proteins in the vegetables tend to putrefy too quickly to be saved by the emerging lactic acid. Without salt, yeast forms, and the fermentation process leads to alcohol rather than pickles.

Between .8 and 1.5 percent of the vegetable’s weight in salt holds off the  rotting process until the lactic acid can take over. Excluding oxygen, either by sealing  the jar or, more usually, by weighting the vegetables so that they remain immersed in liquid, is necessary for successful lactic fermentation.

The ancient Chinese pickled in earthen jars, which caused a white film called kahm yeast, harmless but unpleasant tasting, to form on the top.  Every  two  weeks the  cloth,  board,  and stone  weighting  the vegetables had to be washed or even boiled to remove the film. This added work is why pickling in earthen jars has not remained popular.

In Sichuan, pickled vegetables are still a staple. They are served with  rice,  which  is  never  salted.  The salty  vegetables  contrast pleasantly with the blandness of the warm but unseasoned  rice gruel that is a common breakfast food. In effect, the pickles are salting the rice.

South  of  the  Sichuan  capital  of  Chengdu, lies  Zigong,  a  hilly provincial salt town that grew into a city because  of its preponderance

of brine wells. The crowded, narrow, downhill open-air market in the

center of town continues to sell salt and special pickling jars for the two local specialties, paocai and zhacai. A woman at the market who sold

the glass pickling jars offered this recipe for paocai:

Fill the jar two-thirds with brine. Add whatever vegetables you like and whatever spice you like, cover, and the vegetables are ready in two days.

The spices added are usually hot red Sichuan peppers or ginger, a perennial herb of Indian origin, known to the Chinese since ancient times. The red pepper, today a central ingredient of Sichuan cooking, did not arrive until the sixteenth century, carried to Europe by Columbus,  to India  by the Portuguese,  and to China  by either the Indians, Portuguese, Andalusians, or Basques.

Paocai that is eaten in two days is obviously more about flavor than preserving. After two days the vegetables are still very crisp, and the salt  maintains,  even brightens,  the color.  Zhacai  is  made with salt instead  of brine, alternating layers  of vegetables  with layers  of salt crystals. In time a brine is formed from the juices the salt pulls out of the vegetables. When a peasant has a baby girl, the family puts up a vegetable every year and gives the jars to her when she’s married.

This  shows how long  zhacai  is  kept  before  eating.  The original medieval idea was to marry her after twelve or fifteen jars. Today it usually takes a few more vegetables.

The Chinese also solved the delicate problem of transporting eggs by preserving them in salt. They soaked the eggs, and still do, in brine for more  than a month,  or they soak them  for a shorter time and encase them in salted mud and straw. The resulting egg, of a hardboiled consistency with a bright orange  yolk, will neither  break  nor spoil if properly handled. A more complicated technique, involving salt, ash, lye, and tea, produces the “1,000-year-old egg.” Typical of the Chinese love of poetic hyperbole, 1,000-year-old eggs take about 100 days to make, and will keep  for another 100 days, though the yolk is then a bit green and the smell is strong.

IN  250  B.C., the  time  of  the  Punic  Wars  in the  Mediterranean,  the governor of Shu, today the province of Sichuan, was a man named Li Bing.  The governor was one of the  greatest  hydraulic engineering geniuses of all time.

The coincidence of hydraulic engineering skills and political leadership does not seem strange when  it is remembered that water management was one of the critical issues in developing China, a land of droughts and floods.

The Yellow River,  named for  the  yellowish  silt  it rushes  through northern China, was known as “the father of floods.” It and the Yangtze are  the two great  rivers  of Chinese  history,  both originating  in the Tibetan plateau and winding toward  the  sea on the east  coast  of China. The Yellow runs through arid northern regions and tends to silt up, raising the riverbed, which causes flooding unless dikes are built up around its banks. The Yangtze is a wider river with many navigable tributaries. It flows  through the  green and rainy center of China, bisecting the world’s third largest country, from the Tibetan mountains to Shanghai on the East China Sea.

The rule of the wise Emperor Yao is said to have been a golden age of ancient China, and one reason for this was that Emperor Yao had tamed nature by introducing the concept of flood control. Li Bing has taken on some of the mythic dimensions of Yao, a god who conquered floods and tamed  nature.  But  unlike the  mythical Emperor  Yao, Li Bing’s   existence   is   well   documented.   His   most   extraordinary accomplishment was the building of the first dam, which still functions in modernized  form. At a place  called  Dujiangyan,  he divided the Minjiang River, a tributary of the Yangtze. The diverted water goes into a series of spillways and channels that can be opened  to irrigate in times of droughts and closed in times of flooding. He had three stone figures of men placed in the water as gauges. If their feet were visible, this signaled drought conditions and the dam’s gates were opened to let in water. If their shoulders were submerged, floodwaters had risen too high and the dam’s gates were closed.

Because of  the  Dujiangyan  dam system,  the  plains  of  eastern Sichuan  became an affluent  agricultural  center  of  China.  Ancient records  called  the  area  “Land  of Abundance.”  With the  dam still operating, the Sichuan plains remain an agricultural center today.

In 1974,  this  statue  was found  in a river in Sichuan during work on an irrigation system. Inscriptions on the sleeves tell of three statues built “to perpetually guard the waters.” On the front of the statue the inscription reads “The late governor of Shu, Li Bing.” Ann Paludan in 1974, two water gauges, carved  in A.D. 168, were found in the riverbed  by the  site  of  Li  Bing’s  dam. They seem to  have been replacements for the original water gauge  statues. One of them is the oldest Chinese stone figure ever found of an identifiable individual. It is a statue of Li Bing. The original gauges  he had used depicted gods of flood control. Four centuries after his death, he was considered to be one of these gods.

Li  Bing  made a very simple  but pivotal  discovery.  By his  time, Sichuan had long been a salt-producing area. Salt is known to have been made in Sichuan as early as 3000 B.C. But it was Li Bing who found that the natural brine, from which the salt was made, did not originate   in  the  pools  where  it  was found  but seeped up from underground. In 252 B.C., he ordered the drilling of the world’s first brine wells.

These first wells had wide mouths, more like an open pit, though some went deeper than 300 feet. As the Chinese learned how to drill, the shafts got narrower and the wells deeper.

But sometimes  the people  who dug the wells  would inexplicably become weak, get sick, lie down, and die. Occasionally, a tremendous explosion would  kill an entire crew or flames spit out from the bore holes. Gradually, the salt workers and their communities  realized that an evil spirit from some underworld was rising up through the holes they were digging. By 68 B.C., two wells, one in Sichuan and one in neighboring Shaanxi, became infamous as sites where the evil spirit emerged.  Once a year  the  governors  of the  respective  provinces would visit these wells and make offerings.

B y A.D. 100, the well workers, understanding  that the disturbances were caused by an invisible substance, found the holes where it came out of the ground, lit them, and started placing pots close by. They could cook with it. Soon they learned to insulate bamboo tubes withmud and brine and pipe the invisible force to boiling houses. These boiling houses were open sheds where pots of brine cooked  until the water evaporated and left salt crystals. By A.D. 200, the boiling houses had iron pots heated by gas flames. This is the first known use of natural gas in the world.

Salt  makers  learned  to  drill and shore  up a narrow shaft,  which allowed them to go deeper. They extracted the brine by means of a long bamboo  tube which fit down the shaft. At the bottom of the tube was a leather valve. The weight of the water would force the valve shut while the long tube was hauled out. Then the tube was suspended over a tank, where a poke from a stick would open the valve and release the brine into the tank. The tank was connected to bamboo piping that led to the boiling house. Other bamboo pipes, planted just below the wellhead to capture escaping gas, also went to the boiling house.

Bamboo piping, which was probably first made in Sichuan, is salt resistant, and the salt kills algae and microbes that would cause rot.

The joints were sealed either with mud or with a mixture of tung oil and lime. From the piping at Sichuan brine works, Chinese throughout the country  learned  to  build  irrigation  and plumbing  systems.  Farms, villages, and even houses were built with bamboo  plumbing. By the Middle  Ages, the  time  of  the  Norman  conquest  of  England,  Su Dongpo, a bureaucrat  born in Sichuan,  was building sophisticated bamboo urban plumbing. Large bamboo water mains were installed in Hangzhou in 1089 and in Canton in 1096. Holes and ventilators were installed for dealing with both blockage and air pockets.

Salt producers spread out bamboo piping over the countryside with seeming chaos like the web of a monster spider. The pipes were laid over the landscape to use gravity wherever possible, rising and falling like a roller coaster, with loops to create long downhill runs.

In the mid-eleventh century, while King Harold was unsuccessfully defending England from the Normans, the salt producers of Sichuan were  developing  percussion  drilling,  the  most  advanced drilling technique in the world for the next seven or eight centuries.

A hole about four inches in diameter was dug by dropping a heavy eight-foot rod with a sharp iron bit, guided through a bamboo tube so that it kept pounding  the same spot. The worker stood on a wooden lever, his weight counterbalancing  the eight-foot rod on the other end. He rode the lever up and down, seesaw-like, causing the bit to drop over and over again. After three to five years, a well several hundred feet deep would strike brine.

Ancient  bamboo piping  carrying  brine  through  the Sichuan countryside outside Zigong, circa 1915. Zigong Salt History Museum

In 1066, Harold was killed at Hastings by an arrow, the weapon the Chinese believe was invented in prehistory by Huangdi. At the time of Harold’s death, the Chinese were using gunpowder, which was one of the first major industrial applications for salt. The Chinese had found that mixing potassium nitrate, a salt otherwise known as saltpeter, with sulfur and carbon created a powder that when ignited expanded to gas so quickly   it  produced  an explosion.  In  the  twelfth  century,  when European Crusaders were failing to wrest Jerusalem from the infidel Arabs,  the Arabs  were  beginning  to  learn  of  the  secret  Chinese powder.

LI BI N G H AD lived during one of the  most  important  crossroads  in Chinese history. Centuries of consolidation among warring states had at last produced a unified China. The unified state was the culmination of centuries of intellectual debate about the nature of government and the rights of rulers. At the center of that debate was salt.

The  character   yan  drawn   by  Beijing   salt history professor Guo, in the zhuangzi style of calligraphy that was used until about 200 B.C. Guo Zhenzhong

Chinese governments for centuries had seen salt as a source of state revenue. Texts have been found in China mentioning a salt tax in the  twentieth  century B.C. The ancient  character  for  salt, yan, is  a pictograph in three parts. The lower part shows tools, the upper left is an imperial official, and the upper right is brine. So the very character by which the word salt was written depicted the state’s control of its manufacture.

A substance needed  by all humans for good health, even survival, would make a good tax generator. Everyone had to buy it, and so everyone would support the state through salt taxes. The debate about the salt tax had its roots in Confucius, who lived from 551 to 479 B.C. In Confucius’s time the rulers of various Chinese states assembled what would today be called think tanks, in which selected thinkers advised the ruler and debated among themselves.

Confucius was one of these intellectual advisers. Considered China’s first philosopher of morality, he was disturbed by human foibles and wanted  to  raise  the  standard  of  human  behavior.  He taught  that treating  one’s  fellow  human beings  well  was  as  important  as respecting the Gods, and he emphasized the importance of respecting parents.

Confucius’s students and their students built the system of thought known as Confucianism. Mencius, a student of Confucius’s grandson, passed teachings  down in a book called  the Mencius.  Confucius’s ideas were also recorded in a book called The Analects, which is the basis  of much Chinese  thought  and the  source  of many Chinese proverbs.

During the two and a half centuries between Confucius and Li Bing, China  was a grouping  of numerous  small states  constantly at war.

Rulers fell, and their kingdoms were swallowed up by more powerful ones, which would then struggle  with other surviving states. Mencius traveled  in China explaining to rulers that they stayed in power by a “mandate  from heaven” based on moral principles, and that  if they were  not wise  and moral leaders, the gods would take  away their mandate and they would fall from power.

But  another  philosophy,  known as legalism,  also  emerged.  The legalists  insisted  that  earthly  institutions  effectively  wielding  power were what guaranteed a state’s survival. One of the leading legalists was a man named Shang, who advised  the Qin (pronounced CHIN) state.  Shang said  that respect  for  elders  and tradition should  not interfere   with  reforming,   clearing   out  inefficient   institutions   and replacing them with more effective and pragmatic programs. Legalists struggled to eliminate aristocracy, thereby giving the state the ability to reward and promote based on achievement.

The legalist faction had a new idea about salt. The first written text on a Chinese salt administration is the Guanzi, which contains what is supposed to be the economic advice of a minister who lived from 685 to  643 B.C. to the ruler of the state of Qi. Historians agree that the Guanzi was actually written around  300 B.C., when only seven states still remained and the eastern state of Qi, much under the influence of legalism, was in a survival struggle, which it would eventually lose, with the western state of Qin.

Among the ideas offered by the minister was fixing the price of salt at a higher level than the purchase price so that the state could import the salt and sell it at a profit. “We can thus take revenues from what other states produce.” The adviser goes on to point out that in some non-salt-producing areas people are ill from the lack of it and in their desperation would be willing to pay still higher prices. The conclusion of   the Guanzi is  that  “salt  has the  singularly  important power  to maintain the basic economy of our state.”

By 221 B.C., Qin defeated its last rivals, and its ruler became  the first emperor of united China. China would continue to be ruled by such emperors until 1911.

The proposals in the Guanzi, which became Qi policy, now became the policy of the Qin and the emperor of China. The Qin dynasty was marked  by the legalists’ tendency for huge public works and harsh laws. A price-fixing monopoly on salt and iron kept prices  for both commodities excessively high. It is the first known instance in history of a state-controlled  monopoly of a vital commodity. The salt revenues were used to build not only armies but defensive structures including the Great Wall, designed to keep Huns and other mounted nomadic invaders from the north out of China. But the harsh first dynasty lasted less than fifteen years.

The Han dynasty that replaced it in 207 B.C., ended the unpopular monopolies to demonstrate better, wiser government. But in 120 B.C., expeditions were still being mounted to drive back the Huns, and the treasury was drained to pay for the wars with “barbarians” in the north.

The Han emperor hired a salt maker and ironmaster to research the possibility of resurrecting  the  salt  and iron monopolies. Four years later, he put both monopolies back into place.

China at the time was probably the most advanced  civilization on earth at  what was a high  point  of  territorial expansion,  economic prosperity, and trade. The Chinese world had expanded much farther than that of the Romans. Rome had an empire by conquest, was at the zenith  of  its  power  as well,  but  was menaced by the  Gauls  and Germanic tribes and even more threatened by internal civil wars. The Chinese had first learned of the Roman Empire in 139 B.C., when the emperor Wudi had sent an envoy, Zhang Qian, past the deserts to seek allies to the west. Zhang Qian traveled for twelve years to what is now Turkistan and back and reported on the astounding discovery that there was a fairly advanced  civilization to the west. In 104 B.C. and 102 B.C., Chinese armies reached the area, a former Greek kingdom called Sogdiana with its capital in Samarkand, where they met and defeated a force partly composed of captive Roman soldiers.

In China  the  salt  and iron monopolies,  whose revenue  financed many of these adventures, remained controversial. In 87 B.C., Emperor Wudi,  considered  the  greatest  emperor  of  the  four-century  Han dynasty, died and was replaced by the eight-year-old  Zhaodi. In 81 B.C., six years later, the now-teenage emperor decided, in the manner of the emperors, to invite a debate among wise men on the salt and iron monopolies. He convened sixty notables of varying points of view from around China to debate state administrative policies in front of him.

The central subject was to be the state monopolies on iron and salt.

But what emerged was a contest between Confucianism and legalism over the responsibilities  of good government—an expansive debate on the duties of government, state profit versus private initiative, the logic and limits of military spending, the rights and limits of government to interfere in the economy.

Though the identities of most of the sixty participants are not known, their arguments have been preserved from the Confucian point of view in written form, the Yan tie lun, Discourse on Salt and Iron.

On the one side were Confucians, inspired by Mencius, who, 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.”

On  the   other   side   were   government   ministers   and  thinkers influenced by the legalist Han Feizi, who had died  in 233 B.C. Han Feizi, who had been a student of one of the most famous Confucian teachers, had not believed that it was practical to base government on morality. He believed it should be based on the exercise of power and a legal code that meted out harsh punishment to transgressors. Both rewards and punishments should be automatic and without arbitrary interpretation. He believed laws should be decreed in the interest of the state, that people should be controlled by fear of punishment. If his way was followed, “the State will get rich and the army will be strong,” he claimed.  “Then  it  will  be possible  to  succeed in  establishing hegemony over other states.”

In the salt and iron debate, legalists argued: “It is difficult to see, in these conditions, how we could prevent the soldiers who defend the Great  Wall  from  dying  of  cold  and hunger.  Suppress  the  state monopolies and you deliver a fatal blow to the nation.”

But to this came the Confucian response, “The true conqueror does not have to make war; the great general does not need to put troops in the field nor have a clever battle plan. The sovereign who reigns by bounty does not have an enemy  under heaven. Why do we need military spending?”

To which came the response, “The perverse and impudent Hun has been allowed to cross our border and carry war into the heart of the country, massacring our population and our officers, not respecting any authority. For a long time he has deserved an exemplary punishment.”

It  was argued  that the  borders  had become permanent  military camps that caused  suffering to the people on the interior. “Even if the monopolies  on salt  and iron  represented,  at  the  outset,  a useful measure, in the long term they can’t help but be damaging.”

Even the need for state  revenues  was debated.  One participant quoted Laozi, a contemporary of Confucius and founder of Daoism, “A country is never as poor as when it seems filled with riches.”

The debate was considered a draw. But Emperor Zhaodi, who ruled for fourteen  years  but only lived  to  age twenty-two,  continued  the monopolies, as did his successor. In 44 B.C., the next emperor, Yuandi, abolished them. Three years later, with the treasury emptied by a third successful   western   expedition   to   Sogdiana   in   Turkistan,   he reestablished  the monopolies. They continued to be abolished  and reestablished regularly according to budgetary needs, usually related to  military  activities.  Toward  the  end of  the  first  century A.D.,  a Confucian  government  minister  had them  once more  abolished, declaring, “Government sale of salt means  competing  with subjects for profit. These are not measures fit for wise rulers.”

The state  salt  monopoly disappeared  for  600  years.  But  it  was resurrected. During the Tang dynasty, which lasted from 618 to 907, half the revenue of the Chinese state was derived from salt. Aristocrats showed  off their salt wealth by the unusual extravagance of serving pure salt  at  the dinner table,  something  rarely done in China,  and placing  it in a lavish, ornate saltcellar.

Over the centuries, many popular uprisings bitterly protested the salt monopoly, including an angry mob that took over the city of Xi’an, just north of  Sichuan,  in 880. And the  other  great  moral and political questions of the great debate on salt and iron—the need for profits, the rights and obligations of nobility, aid to the poor, the importance of a balanced budget, the appropriate tax burden, the risk of anarchy, and the dividing line between rule of law and tyranny—have all remained unresolved issues.

CHAPTER TWO

Fish, Fowl, and Pharaohs

ON THE EASTERN end of North Africa’s almost unimaginably vast desert, the Nile River provides a fertile green passage only a few miles wide down both banks. Egyptian civilization has always been crammed into this narrow strip, surrounded by a crawling wind-swept desert, like a lapping sea, that threatens to wash it away. Even today in modern high-rise Cairo, the sweepers come out in the morning to chase away the sand from the devouring desert.

The earliest Egyptian burial sites have been found where the desert begins at the edge of the green strip on either side. They date from about 3000 B.C., the same time as the earliest record of salt making in Sichuan, but before  the era  of the great Egyptian states  and even before  such marks  of  Egyptian  civilization  as  hieroglyphics.  The cadavers at these early burial sites still have flesh and skin. They are not mummies and yet are surprisingly well preserved for 5,000-year- old corpses. The dry, salty desert sand protected them, and this natural desert phenomenon  held the rudiments of an idea about preserving flesh.

To the Egyptians, a dead body was the vessel connecting earthly life to the afterlife. Eternal life could be maintained by a sculpted image of the person or even by the repetition of the deceased’s name, but the ideal circumstance was to have the body permanently preserved. At all stages  of ancient  Egyptian civilization a tomb had two parts:  one, below ground, for housing the corpse, and a second area above for offerings. In simpler burial places, the upper part might be just the open area above ground.

The upper level makes clear the importance the ancient Egyptians attached  to the preparation  and eating  of food.  Elaborate  funereal feasts were held in these spaces, and copious quantities of food were left as offerings. The feasts, and sometimes the preparation of foods, were depicted on the walls. Every important period in ancient Egyptian history produced  tombs  containing detailed  information about food.

Though the intention was to leave this for the benefit of the deceased, it has given posterity a clear view of an elaborate and inventive ancient cuisine.

The poorest may have had little to eat but unraised bread, beer, and onions. The Egyptians credited onions and garlic with great medicinal qualities, believing that onion layers resembled the concentric circles of the universe. Onions were placed in the mummified cadavers of the dead, sometimes serving in place of the eyes. Herodotus, the Greek historian  born  about  490 B.C . and considered  the  founder  of  the modern discipline  of history, described  the tomb of the pyramid of Giza,  built about  2900 B.C. He wrote that an inscription on one wall asserted that during twenty years of construction, the builders supplied the workers  with radishes, onions, and garlic worth 1,600 talents of silver, which in contemporary dollars would be about $2 million. But the upper classes had a richly varied diet, perhaps the most evolved cuisine of their time. Remains found in a tomb from before   2000 B.C . include  quail,  stewed  pigeon,  fish,  ribs  of  beef, kidneys, barley porridge, wheat bread, stewed figs, berries, cheese, wine, and beer. Other funereal offerings found in tombs included salted fish and a wooden container holding table salt.

The Egyptians  mixed  brine  with vinegar and used it as a sauce known as oxalme, which was later used by the Romans. Like the Sichuan Chinese, the Egyptians had an appreciation  for vegetables preserved in brine or salt. “There is no better food than salted vegetables” are words written on an ancient papyrus. Also, they made a condiment from preserved fish or fish entrails in brine, perhaps similar to the Chinese forerunner of soy sauce.

The ancient Egyptians may have been the first to cure meat and fish with salt. The earliest Chinese record of preserving fish in salt dates from  around   2000 B.C . Salted  fish and birds  have been found  in Egyptian tombs from considerably earlier. Curing flesh in salt absorbs the moisture in which bacteria grows. Furthermore, the salt itself kills bacteria. Some of the impurities found in ancient sodium chloride were other salts such as saltpeter, which are even more aggressive bacteria slayers. Proteins unwind when exposed  to heat, and they do the same when exposed to salt. So salting has an effect resembling cooking.

Whether the Egyptians  discovered  this process  first  or not,  they were certainly the first civilization to preserve food on a large scale.

Those narrow  fertile  strips  on either  bank of  the  Nile  were  their principal source of food, and a dry year in which the Nile failed to flood could be disastrous. To be prepared, Egyptians put up food in every way they could, including stockpiling grain in huge silos. This fixation on preserving a food supply led to considerable knowledge of curing and fermentation.

Were it not for their aversion to pigs, the Egyptians would probably have invented  ham, for  they  salt-cured  meat  and knew how to domesticate  the pig. But Egyptian religious leadership  pronounced pigs carriers of leprosy, made pig farmers social outcasts, and never depicted the animal on the walls of tombs. They tried to domesticate for meat the hyenas  that scavenged  the edge of villages looking for scraps and dead animals to eat, but most Egyptians were revolted by the idea of eating such an animal. Other failed Egyptian attempts at animal  husbandry include  antelope,  gazelle,  oryx,  and ibex.  In the northern Sinai and what is now the southern Israeli Negev Desert, the remnants  of  pens for  such fauna,  the  remains  of  these  failed experiments,  have been found.  But  the  Egyptians  did  succeed in domesticating fowl—ducks, geese, quail, pigeon, and pelican. Ancient walls show fowl being splayed, salted, and put into large earthen jars.

A great source of Egyptian food was the wetlands of the Nile, the reedy marshes where fowl could be found, as well as fish such as carp, eel, mullet, perch, and tigerfish. The Egyptians salted much of this fish.

They also  dried,  salted,  and pressed  the  eggs of mullet,  creating another of the great Mediterranean  foods known in Italian as bottarga.

The Egyptians lay claim to another pivotal food invention: making the fruit of the olive tree edible. Almost every Mediterranean culture claims olives as its discovery. The Egyptians of 4000 B.C. believed that the goddess Isis,  wife  of Osiris,  taught them  how to grow olives.  The Greeks have a similar legend. But the Hebrew word for olive, zait, is probably older than the Greek word, elaia, and is thought to refer to Said in the Nile Delta. It may have been Syrians or Cretans who first bred the Olea europaea from the pathetic, scraggly, wild oleaster tree.

The Egyptians were not great olive oil producers and imported most of their olive oil from the Middle East. The fresh-picked fruit of the olive tree is so hard and bitter, so unappealing, that it is a wonder anyone experimented long enough  to find a way to make it edible. But the Egyptians learned very early that the bitter glucides unique to this fruit, now known as oleuropeina, could be removed from the fruit by soaking in water, and the fruit could  be softened in brine. The salt would render it not only edible but enjoyable.

Making olives and making olive oil are at cross purposes, since a good eating  olive  is  low  in  oil  content.  It  may be that  this  was characteristic of Egyptian olives. These eating olives were included in the food caches of ancient Egyptian tombs.

The Egyptians  were  the  inventors  of  raised  bread.  To make leavened  bread, a gluten-producing grain, not barley or millet, was necessary, and about 3000 B.C. the Egyptians developed wheat that could be ground and stretched into a dough capable of entrapping carbon  dioxide  from  yeast.  The starting  yeast  was often  leftover fermented dough, sour dough, which is another example of lactic acid fermentation. Egyptian bakers created an enormous variety of breads in different shapes, sometimes with the addition of honey or milk or eggs. Most of these doughs, as with modern breads, were made from a base of flour, water, and a pinch of salt.

In 1250 B.C., when Moses liberated the Hebrew slaves, leading them out of Egypt across the Sinai, the Hebrews took with them only flat unleavened  bread, matzo, which is described by the Hebrew phrase lechem oni, meaning “bread of the poor.” Poor Egyptians did not have the sumptuous assortment of Egyptian raised bread but, like people outside of Egypt, ate flat bread known as ta, which sometimes had coarse grain, even chaff, in it and lacked the luxury of “a pinch of salt.” According  to  Jewish  legend,  the  fleeing Hebrews  took unleavened bread because  they lacked time to let the bread rise. But it may also have been what they were  used to  making,  or  perhaps  it  was a conscious rejection of Egyptian culture and the luxuries of the slave owners. Raised bread and salt curing were emblematic of the high- living Egyptians.

THE EGYPTIANS  MADE salt by evaporating  seawater in the Nile Delta. They also may have procured some salt from Mediterranean  trade. They clearly obtained salt from African trade, especially from Libya and Ethiopia. But they also had their own desert of dried salt lakes and salt deposits. It is known that they had a number of varieties of salt, including a table  salt called  “Northern salt” and another called  “red salt,” which may have come from a lake near Memphis.

Long before seventeenth- and eighteenth-century chemists began identifying and naming the elements of different salts, ancient alchemists, healers, and cooks were aware that different salts existed, with different tastes and chemical properties that made them suitable for different tasks. The Chinese had invented gunpowder by isolating saltpeter, potassium nitrate. The Egyptians found a salt that, though they could not have expressed it in these terms, is a mixture of sodium bicarbonate  and sodium carbonate  with a small amount  of sodium chloride. They found this salt in nature in a wadi, an Arab word for a dry riverbed, some forty miles northwest of Cairo. The spot was called Natrun, and they named the salt netjry, or natron, after the wadi. Natron is found in “white” and “red,” though white natron is usually gray and red natron is pink. The ancient Egyptians referred to natron as “the divine salt.”

The culminating ritual of the lengthy Egyptian funeral was known as “the opening of the mouth,” in which a symbolic cutting of the umbilical cord freed the corpse to eat in the afterlife, just as cutting a newborn baby’s cord is the prelude to its taking earthly nourishment. In 1352

B.C., the child pharoah Tutankhamen died at the age of eighteen, and his tomb, discovered in 1922, is the most elaborate and well preserved ever found. The tomb was furnished with a bronze knife for the  symbolic  cutting of the  cord,  surrounded by four shrines,  each containing  cups filled  with the  two  vital  ingredients   for preserving mummies: resin and natron.

Investigators  argue  about  whether sodium  chloride  was used in mummification. It  is  difficult to  know, since  natron contains  a small amount of sodium chloride that leaves traces of common salt in all mummies. Sodium chloride appears  to have been used instead  of natron in some burials of less affluent people.

Herodotus, though writing more than two millennia after the practice began, offered a description in gruesome detail of ancient Egyptian mummification, which, with a few exceptions, such as his confusion of juniper oil for cedar oil, has stood up to the examination and chemical analysis  of modern  archaeology.  The techniques  bear  remarkable similarity to the Egyptian practice of preserving birds and fish through disembowelment and salting:

The most perfect process is as follows: As much as possible of the brain is removed via the nostrils with an iron hook, and what cannot be reached with the hook is washed out with drugs; next, the flank is opened  with a flint knife and the whole contents of the abdomen  removed; the cavity is then thoroughly cleaned and washed out,  firstly  with palm  wine  and again  with  an infusion of ground spices. After that, it is filled with pure myrrh, cassia and every other aromatic substance, excepting frankincense,  and sewn up again,  after  which  the  body is placed in natron, covered entirely over, for seventy days—never longer. When this period is over, the body is washed and then wrapped from head to foot in linen cut into strips and smeared on the underside  with gum, which is  commonly used by the Egyptians instead of glue. In this condition the body is given back to the family, who have a wooden case made, shaped like a human figure, into which it is put.

He then gave a less  expensive  method  and finally the  discount technique:

The third method, used for embalming the bodies of the poor, is simply to wash out the intestines, and keep the body for seventy days in natron.

The parallels  between preserving food and preserving mummies were apparently not lost on posterity. In the nineteenth century, when mummies  from Saqqara  and Thebes were  taken  from tombs  and brought to Cairo, they were taxed as salted fish before being permitted entry to the city.

MORE   THAN  A gastronomic  development,  the  salting   of  fowl  and especially of fish was an important step in the development of economies. In the ancient world, the Egyptians were leading exporters of raw foods such as wheat and lentils. Although salt was a valuable commodity for trade, it was bulky. By making a product with the salt, a value  was added per  pound, and unlike fresh  food,  salt  fish,  well handled, would not spoil. The Egyptians did not export great quantities of salt, but exported considerable amounts of salted food, especially fish, to the Middle East. Trade in salted food would shape economies for the next four millennia.

About     2800 B.C.,   the   Egyptians   began trading   salt   fish  for Phoenician cedar, glass, and purple dye made from seashells by a secret Phoenician formula. The Phoenicians had built a trade empire with these products, but, in time, they also traded the products of their partners, such as Egyptian salt fish and North African salt, throughout the Mediterranean.

Originally inhabiting a narrow strip of land on the Lebanese coast north of Mount Carmel, the Phoenicians were a mixture of races, only partly Semitic. They never fused into a homogenous nation. Culturally, other people, first the Egyptians and later the Greeks, dominated their way of life. But economically, they were a leading power operating from major ports such as Tyre.

Splitting and salt curing fish is illustrated in an Egyptian wall painting in the tomb of Puy-em-rê, Second Priest of Amun, circa 1450 B.C.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

They traded with everyone  they  encountered.  When Solomon constructed a temple in Jerusalem, the Phoenicians provided both wood—their famous “cedars of Lebanon”—and craftsmen. In the Old Testament it is mentioned that Jerusalem fish markets were supplied from Tyre, and the fish they sold was probably salted fish, since fresh fish would have spoiled before reaching Jerusalem.

It is a Mediterranean habit to credit great food ideas to the Phoenicians. They are said to have spread the olive tree throughout the Mediterranean. The Spanish say the Phoenicians introduced chickpeas,  a western  Asian  bean, to  the  western  Mediterranean, though evidence  of  wild  native  chickpeas  has been found  in  the Catalan part of southern France. Some French writers have said the Phoenicians invented bouillabaisse, which is probably not true, and the Sicilians say the Phoenicians were the first to catch bluefin tuna off their  western  coast,  which probably is  true.  The Phoenicians  also established a saltworks on the western side of the island of Sicily, near present-day Trapani, to cure the catch.

Ancient Phoenician coins with images of the tuna have been found near a number of Mediterranean  ports. At the time, bluefin tuna, the swift, steel-blue-backed  fish that is  the largest member of the tuna family, might have attained sizes of over 1,500 pounds each, but this is according to ancient writers who also believed the fish fed on acorns.

Seeking warmer water for spawning, bluefin leave the Atlantic Ocean, enter the Strait of Gibraltar, pass by North Africa and western Sicily, cruise past Greece, swim through the Bosporus and into the Black Sea.  At  all  the  points  of land  near  the  bluefin’s  passage in  the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians established tuna fisheries.

About  800 B.C., when the Phoenicians first settled on the coast of what  is  today  Tunisia,  they  founded  a  seaport,  Sfax,  which  still prospers today. Sfax became, and has remained, a source of salt and salted  fish for Mediterranean  trade. The Phoenicians  also  founded Cadiz in southern Spain, from where they exported tin. Almost 2,500 years  before  the  Portuguese  mariners  explored  West  Africa,  the Phoenicians sailed from Cadiz through the Strait of Gibraltar and on to the West African coast.

The Phoenicians are also credited with the first alphabet. Chinese and Egyptian languages used pictographs, drawings depicting objects or concepts. Babylonian, which became  the international language in the Middle East, also had a long list of characters, each standing for a word or combination of sounds. But the Phoenicians used a Semitic forerunner of ancient Hebrew, the earliest traces of which were found in the Sinai from 1400 B.C., which had only twenty-two characters, each representing a particular sound. It was the simplicity of this alphabet as much as their commercial prowess that opened up trade in the ancient Mediterranean.

INLAND FROM THE port of Sfax are dried desert lake beds where salt can be scraped up in the dry season. This technique, the same as was used 8,000 years ago on Lake Yuncheng in China, and referred to as “dragging  and gathering,”  was the  original  Egyptian  way of  salt gathering, the method used for harvesting natron in the wadi of Natrun. The Arabs called such a saltworks a sebkha, and on a modern map of North Africa, from the Egyptian-Libyan border to the Algerian- Moroccan line, from Sabkaht Shunayn to Sebkha de Tindouf, sebkhas are still clearly labeled.

In ancient times, the Fezzan region, today in southern Libya, had contact with Egypt and the Mediterranean. Herodotus wrote of the use of horses and chariots for warfare in Fezzan, which was unusual at the time.  Even more  unusual,  horses  also  may have been used to transport salt. By the third century B.C., Fezzan was noted for its salt production. Fezzan producers had moved beyond simply scraping the sebkhas. The crust was boiled  until fairly pure  crystals  had been separated,  and they  were  then  molded  into  three-foot-high  white tapered  cylinders. Traders  then carried these  oddly phallic objects, carefully wrapped in straw mats, by caravan across the desert. Salt is still made and transported the same  way today in parts of the Sahara.

Because a profitable salt shipment is bulky and heavy, accessible transportation has always been the essential ingredient in salt trade. In most of Asia, Europe, and the Americas, waterways have been the solution.  Salt  was traded  either  through seagoing  ports  or,  as in Sichuan,  by a sprawling  river system.  But  in the African  continent, where a wealth of salt was located in the wadis and dry lake beds of the waterless Sahara, another solution was found—the camel.

The earliest known journeys across the Sahara, in about 1000 B.C., were  by oxen and then  by horse-drawn  chariots.  Trans-Saharan commerce existed in ancient times, but crossings were rare events until the  third century A.D., when the camel replaced  the horse. The camel was a native of North America, though it became  extinct there two million years ago. Around 3000 B.C. , relatively late in the history of animal domestication, camels were domesticated in the Middle East.

The wild species  has vanished.  Between the domestication of the camel and its use in the Sahara, several millennia passed. But once the domestic camel made its Sahara debut, its use spread quickly. By the  Middle  Ages, caravans  of  40,000  camels  carried  salt  from Taoudenni  to  Timbuktu,  a 435-mile  journey taking  as long as one month. Since then, continuing to this day, caravans of camels have moved bulk goods across the Sahara to western and central Africa. As the trade prospered, so did banditry, and the caravans grew in size for protection. As salt moved south, gold, kola nut, leather, and cotton from Hausaland, in present-day Nigeria, was traded north. Later, products for Europe, including acacia gum, which was needed  for fabric sizing, and melegueta pepper, the seeds of an orange West African fruit that were a Renaissance European food craze, were also brought north.

Slaves, too, were taken on this route and even at times traded for salt.

In  1352,  Ibn  Batuta,  the  greatest  Arab-language  traveler  of  the Middle Ages, who had journeyed overland across Africa, Europe, and Asia, reported visiting the city of Taghaza, which, he said, was entirely built of salt, including an elaborate mosque. By the time Europeans first discovered it in the nineteenth century, the fabled western Saharan city of salt had been abandoned. Taghaza was not the earliest report of buildings made of salt. The first-century-A.D. Roman Pliny the Elder, writing of rock salt mining in Egypt, mentioned houses built of salt.

Taghaza is imagined as a sparkling white city, but it was swept by Saharan sands, and the pockmarked salt turned a dingy gray. Though its salt construction impressed later travelers, salt blocks were the only material available for building, and Taghaza  was probably a miserable work  camp, inhabited  mostly by the slaves  forced  to work it,  who completely depended  on the arrival of caravans to bring them food.

In ancient Taghaza, salt was quarried from the near surface in 200-pound blocks loaded on camels, one block on each side. The powerful animals carried them 500 miles to Timbuktu, a trading center because of its location on the northernmost crook of the Niger River, which connects most of West Africa. In Timbuktu, the goods  of North Africa, the Sahara, and West Africa were exchanged, and the wealth from trade  built a cultural center.  Timbuktu became a university town,  a center of learning. But to the locals in Taghaza, salt was worth nothing except as a building material. They lacked everything but salt.

It was said that in the markets to the south of Taghaza salt was exchanged   for its weight in gold,  which was an exaggeration.  The misconception comes from the West African style of silent barter noted by Herodotus and subsequently by many other Europeans. In the gold- producing regions of West Africa, a pile of gold would be set out, and a salt merchant  would counter with a pile of salt, each side altering their piles until an agreement was reached. No words were exchanged during this process, which might take days. The salt merchants often arrived  at  night to  adjust  their piles  and leave  unseen. They were extremely secretive, not wanting to reveal the location of their deposits.

From this it was reported in Europe that salt was exchanged in Africa for its weight in gold. But it is probable that the final agreed-upon two piles were never of equal weight.

The fact that in ancient Egypt the poor were mummified with sodium chloride and the rich with natron suggests that the Egyptians valued natron more. But the reverse appears to have been true in other parts of ancient Africa. Generally, the richer Africans used salt with higher sodium chloride content, and natron was the salt of the poor. In West Africa  white natron was used for bean cakes of millet or sorghum, called kunu. The natron in this dish was thought to be beneficial to nursing mothers. Natron was preferred to salt for bean dishes because it was thought that the carbonate counteracted gas. It was also used, and still is, as a stomach medicine—a natural bicarbonate of soda. Natron was believed to be a male aphrodisiac as well.

In Timbuktu, which was a center of not only the salt trade but the tobacco  trade,  a mixture of tobacco  and natron was chewed. The Hausa also used natron to dissolve indigo so that the color could be fixed. Soap was made from natron and an oil from the kernel of the shea butter tree.

The African salt market has always distinguished between a wide assortment of salts, most of them impure. Salt that was mainly sodium chloride was used exclusively for eating. Sodium chloride, natron, and other salts of varying impurities, from different locations, were widely known by their own names. African merchants, healers, and cooks were well versed in this array of salts. Trona was the name of a well- known natron valued for food; it was gathered from the shore of Lake Chad.

Africans have maintained a tradition of a wide variety of different salts for different dishes, but they always treat any salt as a valuable substance that must not be wasted. R. Omosunlola Williams, a Nigerian educator, published a cookbook  for Nigerian housewives in 1957, shortly before Nigerian independence. Among her suggestions for salt:

Salt is molded in some parts of Nigeria to make  it last longer.

This  has to be scraped  and crushed  before  it  is  used. The Yorubas use a kind of solid salt called iyo obu. They tie it in a piece of cloth and squeeze  it in water. This is removed when it has seasoned the water sufficiently and is kept and re-used.

Africans became so accustomed to their impure salts, with specific tasks  found  for  each blend,  that  when Europeans  in  the  age of colonialism introduced pure sodium chloride, Africans mixed  it with other salts to make salt compounds  more to their liking.

CHAPTER THREE

Saltmen Hard as Codfish

IN 1666, THE Saltzburg Chronicle described the following incident:

In the  year  1573, on the  13th of the  winter  month, a shocking comet-star appeared in the sky, and on the 26th of this month a man, 9 hand spans in length, with flesh, legs, hair, beard  and clothing  in a state  of non-decay, although somewhat flattened, the skin a smoky brown color, yellow and hard like codfish, was dug out  of the  Tuermberg  mountain  6300 shoe  lengths  deep and was  laid  out  in front of  the  church  for all  to  see.  After  a while, however, the body began to rot and was laid to rest.

He was found by salt miners in the Dürnberg mountain mine near the Austrian   town   of  Hallein,   a  name  which   means  “saltwork,”   near Salzburg, which means “salt town.” The perfectly preserved body, dried and salted  “like  codfish,”  was  that  of a  bearded  man with  a  pickax found near him, evidently a miner, wearing pants, a woolen jacket, leather shoes, and a cone-shaped felt hat. The bright colors of the patterned clothing—plaid twill with brilliant red—were striking, not only because  of how well the  salt conserved  the  colors  but also  because Europeans are not thought of as people dressed in such a flaming palate.  In 1616, a  similar  body had been found  in  nearby  Hallstatt, which also means “salt town.”

Inside   these   alpine   mountains   of  salt,   the   weight   of  the   rock overhead causes  walls to shift, opening cavities and closing up shafts. Water running over the rock salt turns to brine, which then crystalizes, sealing   over   cracks.   Three   prehistoric   miners   have  been  found, trapped in their dark ancient work sites, and many tools, leather shoes, clothes in their original bright colors—the oldest color-preserved European textiles  ever  found—leather  sacks  for hauling  rock salt  on their backs, torches made of pine sticks bundled together and dipped

in resin, and a horn possibly used to warn of cave-ins—all well preserved in salt. The bodies were dated to 400 B.C., but some of the objects found in the remains of a log cabin thatched-roof village on the mountainside may date back to 1300 B.C.

The colorfully dressed  salt  miners  of Hallein were  Celts.  Celts  did not illustrate their culture on temple walls as the Egyptians did; nor did they have chroniclers as the Greeks and Romans did. The guardians of Celtic culture, the Druids, did not leave written records. So most of what  we  know of  them  is  from  Greek  and  Roman historians  who described the Celts as huge and terrifying men in bright fabrics. Aristotle  described  them  as  barbarians  who went  naked in the  cold northern weather, abhorred obesity, and were hospitable to strangers. Diodorus, a Greek historian who lived in Sicily, wrote: “They are very tall in stature, with rippling muscles under clear white skin. Their hair is blond, but not naturally so. They bleach it, to this day artificially washing it  in  lime  and combing  it  back  from  their  foreheads.  They look  like wood demons, their hair thick and shaggy like a horse’s mane. Some of these  are  clean shaven, but others—especially those  of high rank, shave their cheeks but leave a moustache that covers the whole of the mouth  and,  when they  eat  and  drink,  acts  like  a  sieve,  trapping particles of food.”

It is a sad fate for a people to be defined for posterity by their enemies.  Even the  name, Celt,  is  not  from their  own Indo-European language  but  from  Greek. Keltoi, the  name given  to  them  by Greek historians, among them Herodotus, means “one who lives in hiding or under cover.” The Romans, finding them less mysterious, called them Galli or Gauls, also coming from a Greek word, used by Egyptians as well, hal, meaning  “salt.” They were  the  salt people. The name of the town  that  sits  on an East  German  salt  bed, Halle,  like  the  Austrian towns of Hallein, Swäbisch Hall, and Hallstatt, has the same root as do both Galicia in northern Spain and Galicia in southern Poland, where the  town of Halych is  found. All these  places  were  named for Celtic saltworks.

Their  land  was in what is  now Hungary, Austria, and Bavaria. The Rivers Rhine, Main, Neckar, Ruhr, and Isar are all thought to have been named by the  Celts. Like  the  ancient Chinese  emperors, they based their economy on salt and iron and so needed waterways to transport their heavy goods.

The Celts used rivers for trade and conquest. They moved west into France, south into northern Spain, and north into Belgium, named after a Celtic tribe, the Belgae. At the time that the mine shaft trapped the miner in Dürnberg,  Celts were moving into the British Isles and the Mediterranean.  In  390 B.C.,  the  Celts  sacked  Rome, having  traveled eighty miles in four  days on horseback in an age  when western Europeans      had     not seen    mounted    cavalry.    They   terrorized townspeople with their heavy swords and loud war cries. The Celts controlled Rome for the next forty years, and in 279 B.C., they invaded what is now Turkey.

Exactly how far in the world they traveled, settled, and traded is not certain. Until the nineteenth century, Western history generally dismissed the Celts as crude and frightening barbarians. But in 1846, a mining engineer named Johann Georg Ramsauer began looking for pyrite  deposits  in  the  area  of  the  Hallstatt  salt  mine  near  Hallein. Instead he found two skeletons, an ax, and a piece of bronze jewelry. Then he discovered seven more bodies buried with valuables. He reported his findings to the government in Vienna and received funding from the curator of the imperial coin collection to continue digging. In one summer  he found  another  58 graves.  In sixteen years  he found 1,000 graves, both burials and cremation urns, and carefully cataloged thousands of objects. Numbering each grave, an artist made a watercolor record of the bodies and artifacts at each site. Ramsauer’s meticulous scientific methodology made him a pioneer in the new science  of  archaeology.  In  the  process,  a  great  deal  was  learned about the early salt-trading Celts. The Hallstatt Period became the archaeological name for a rich early Iron Age culture, beginning about 700 B.C. and lasting until 450 B.C.

Ramsauer’s Hallstatt graves were mostly from 700 to 600 B.C. , with some  as  late  as  500 B.C. The  Dürnberg  discoveries  from  400 B.C. suggest that the Hallstatt mine began to diminish in importance as the Dürnberg one became a more important source of salt.

Ramsauer’s dig and the Dürnberg  finds showed a society living off of  salt  mining,  secluded  on remote  and  rugged  mountains  at  an altitude of 3,000 feet, and yet trading to the far ends of the continent. These   people   were   buried   with   valuable   possessions from   the Mediterranean, from  North Africa, even from  the  Near  East. Ramsauer’s investigation of these salt miners began to challenge the perception of northern Europe’s Iron Age barbarians.

ONLY IN THE 1990s did Westerners become aware of the mummies that had been found in the Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. They had been discovered  in and near the  Tarim Basin, west of Tibet, east of Samarkand and Tashkent, between China and central Asia along the Silk  Road, the  principal  trade  route  between the  Mediterranean and Beijing.  It  was  the  road  of Marco  Polo,  but  these  people  had lived more  than  three  millennia  earlier,  about  2000 B.C. As  with  the  early Egyptian  burials  that  are  1,000 years  older,  the  corpses  had been preserved by the naturally salty soil.

The condition of the bodies and their bright colored clothing was spectacular. The men wore leggings striped in blue, ochre, and crimson. They appeared to be tall with blond or light brown hair, sometimes  red  beards,  and the  women’s hair  woven in  long  blond braids. These unknown people were in appearance notably similar to the  large  blue-eyed  blond Celtic  warriors  described  by the  Romans almost two millennia later. Their conical felt hats and twill jackets bore a close resemblance to those of the salt miners in Hallein and Hallstatt

—not unlike the much later plaids of the Scottish Highlands. The red- and-blue pinstripes were almost identical to fabrics found in the Dürnberg mine. Textile historian Elizabeth Wayland Barber concluded that  even the  weave  was  nearly  identical  workmanship.  Why Celts might  have  been in  the  salty  desert  of Asia  many centuries  before there were known to be Celts remains a mystery.

In the centuries when the Celtic culture was documented, beginning 1,300 years after these seemingly Celtic bodies were buried in Asian salt, they did trade and travel great distances, usually selling salt from their rich central European mines. Like the Egyptians, they learned that it was not as profitable to trade and transport salt as salted foods.

According  to  the  Greeks  and Romans, who not  only wrote  about Celts   but   traded   Mediterranean   products   for   their   salt   and  salt products, Celts ate a great deal of meat, both wild and domesticated. Salted meat was a Celtic specialty.

When the Romans finally succeeded  in imposing their culture on the Celts,  Moccus, which means “pig,”  was the  Celtic  name for the  god Mercury. The Celts did not mean it unkindly.  To the pig-loving Celts, the leg of wild boar was considered the choicest piece of meat and was reserved for warriors. With domesticated pigs also, according to Strabo,  the  first-century-B.C. Greek  historian,  the  Celts  preferred  the legs. It is likely that among the Celtic contributions to Western culture are the first salt-cured hams.

Athenaeus, a first-century-A.D. Greek  living  in Rome, wrote  that  the Celts most valued the upper part of the ham, which was reserved for the bravest warrior. If two warriors claimed rights to this cut, the dispute would be settled by combat. Fighting over the ham may be more the Greco-Roman view of Celts than the reality. But the Celts certainly made, traded, and ate hams.

Among the few remaining Celtic cultures, this tradition of savoring a salt-cured  leg  from the  hunt  endures. An example  is  Scottish  salted haunch of venison.

Take the venison to be salted after it has hung in the larder for two  days.  Cut  it  into  pieces  the  required  size.  See  that  it  is clean and free from fly, but on no account wash it with water [her italics].   Take   2   pounds  kitchen   salt,   one   quarter   pound demerara  sugar, 1 teaspoon black pepper, one half teaspoon nitre [natron]. Mix these well together. Rub pieces of venison on every side  with this  mixture  for 2–3 days in succession.  Then place them in a wooden tub, or earthenware jar, and press them well  together.  After  10  days  the  venison  is  ready  for  use.

Venison  treated  in this  way, if  pressed  into  a  jar and the  air excluded,  should  keep  for  months,  and a  haunch which  has been well salted  in this  manner  for about three  weeks can be hung  up  to   dry  as  a  ham.—Margaret   Fraser, A  Highland Cookery Book, 1930

According  to  Annette  Hope, an Edinburgh  librarian who collected Scottish  recipes,  Margaret  Fraser  came  from  a  family  of gamekeepers on a Highland estate, and most of her recipes were for venison, though the same ideas may have been used for legs of other game and domestic meat. The sugar—she specified the light brown of Demerara,  British  Guiana—would  not  have  been  used  by original Celts, but the natron may have been.

THE EARLY CELTIC salt miners understood their mountains. They realized that  horizontal  shafts  from  the  mountainside,  though  a  great  deal easier to travel and move rock through, would require far more digging to  reach the  rich salt deposits. Instead  they dug at steep  angles  and skillfully  shored  up the  shafts.  The miners  had to  climb  out,  flaming torch clenched  in their  teeth,  leather  back sack  loaded  with rock,  at forty-five- or fifty-degree angles. Though the master ironworkers of their age,  they made their  picks  and other  metal  tools  out  of bronze,  the antiquated metal of a more primitive era. They seem to have learned that bronze would not be corroded by salt the way iron is.

The Celts, or their central European ancestors known as the Urnfield people,  because  they cremated  their  dead  and buried them  in urns, had many innovations  besides  those  in salt  mining. They developed the  first organized  agriculture  in northern Europe, experimenting  with such revolutionary ideas as fertilizer and crop rotation. They introduced wheat to northern Spain. They were sophisticated bronze casters, skilled  iron miners  and forgers.  They introduced  to  much of western Europe iron and their many iron inventions, including chain armor and the feared Celtic sword, which was three feet long. But they also invented the seamless iron rim for wagon wheels, the barrel, and possibly the  horseshoe.  They may have been the  first  Europeans  to ride horses.

One thing the Celts were not advanced in was statecraft. Ironically, the closest the Celts ever came to fusing into a nation was in the first century when Julius  Caesar  conquered  Gaul. A Celtic  leader  named Vercingetorix, which means “warrior king,” gathered warriors from the diverse Celtic groups to face the Romans at Alesia, now Alise-Sainte

Reine  on the  lower  Seine.  Vercingetorix’s  father  had attempted  the same thing unsuccessfully in 80 B.C.

According to Caesar, while besieged Celts were so desperate that they were debating whether to eat the elderly noncombatants, forty-one Celtic tribes responded to Vercingetorix’s call by sending a relief column to Alesia of 8,000 horsemen and 250,000 foot soldiers.

Some historians  believe  that had the  Celts  won at Alesia, it would have been the beginning of a united Celtic nation. But the Romans won and subjugated the Celts and wrote their history.

Despite the fame of their bright clothing, Celts are described going naked into battle except for horned  helmets. We are told that they had frightening  war  cries  and that  the  terrifying  songs  of their  ancesters were preludes to violent attacks. They fought, the Romans said, with a furor. And they  swooped off heads  with  their  large  iron swords  and hung these  trophies  on their  houses  or strung  them  along  the  horse bridle. Vercingetorix was apparently a ruthless leader, a fanatic obsessed  with freeing his people from the Romans, willing to destroy entire towns and ruthlessly level opponents to achieve his goal.

Gold stater of the Avernes tribe with the face of Apollo and    the inscription    “Vercingetorixs.” The   Granger Collection

But he was trying to stand up to the Roman legions of Julius Caesar. The Roman historian Plutarch estimated that the civilized Romans under Julius Caesar, in his decade-long campaign in Gaul, destroyed 800 towns and villages and enslaved 3 million people.

After the  Roman campaigns  were  over, all that remained  of Celtic life were isolated groups on the far Atlantic coasts: northwestern Iberia, the Brittany peninsula, the Cornish tip of England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. All of these groups were treated by the chroniclers of later nation-states as recalcitrant people interfering with the building of great states—Britain, France, or Spain.

The Roman victory had been total. Celtic inventions—in salt mining, iron, agriculture,  trade,  horsemanship—enriched  the  Roman Empire. Celtic salt mines became part of Roman wealth, and Celtic hams became part of the Roman diet with few ever remembering that such things were once Celtic. The Celts were innovators. The Romans were nation builders.

CHAPTER FOUR

Salt’s Salad Days

THE ROMANS  PAID homage  to  democracy,  the  rights  of  the  common

citizen and, for a time, republicanism. But they rarely lived up to any of these ideals. Roman history is the chronic struggle between the privileged patricians and the disenfranchised plebeians. Plebeians fought to have a voice, and patricians endeavored to keep them excluded.  The Roman patrician often tried  to  keep his  privileges  by offering lesser rights to plebeians. In this spirit, patricians insisted that every man had a right  to  salt.  “Common salt,”  as  it  has come to  be known, was a Roman concept.

Patricians ate an elaborate cuisine that expressed opulence in ingredients and presentation. Roman cooks seemed to avoid leaving anything  in its  natural  state.  They loved  the  esoteric,  such as  sow’s vulva  and teats, a dish that is  frequently mentioned  for banquets  and which provoked a debate as to whether it should be from a virgin sow or, as Pliny the Elder suggested, one whose first litter was aborted.

Sometimes the cuisine emphasized local pride. The best pike had to be caught in the Tiber between the city bridges of Rome. But food was  also  a  way to  boast  of  conquest,  with  hams  from  Germania, oysters from Britannia, and sturgeon from the Black Sea.  Meanwhile, plebeians ate coarse bread, cereals, a little salt fish, and olives. And the government made certain they had salt.

Roman government  did  not  maintain a monopoly on salt  sales  as did  the  Chinese,  but  it  did  not  hesitate  to  control  salt  prices  when it seemed necessary. The earliest record of Roman government interference in salt prices was in 506 B.C., only three years before the kingdom was declared a republic. The state took over Rome’s premier source   of  salt,  the   private   saltworks   in  Ostia,  because   the   king regarded its prices as too high.

Both under the  republic  and, later, the  empire, Roman government periodically subsidized the price of salt to ensure that it was easily affordable  for plebeians. It  was a gift, like  a tax cut, that government could bestow when in need of popular support. On the eve of Emperor Augustus’s decisive naval campaign defeating Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, Augustus garnered public support by distributing free olive oil and salt.

But during the Punic Wars (264 to 146 B.C.), a century-long struggle- to-the-death  for  control  of  the  Mediterranean  with  the  Phoenician colony of Carthage, Rome manipulated salt prices to raise money for the war. In the fashion of the Chinese emperors, the Roman government declared an artificially high price for salt and put the profits at the  disposal of the  military. A low price  was still maintained  in the city of Rome, but elsewhere a charge was added in accordance with the  distance  from  the  nearest  saltwork.  This  salt  tax  system  was devised by Marcus Livius, a tribune, a government official representing plebeians. Because  of his salt price scheme, he became known as the salinator, which later became the title of the official in the treasury who was responsible for decisions about salt prices.

MOST ITALIAN CITIES were founded proximate to saltworks, starting with Rome in the hills behind the saltworks at the mouth of the Tiber. Those saltworks,  along  the  northern  bank, were  controlled  by Etruscans.  In 640 B.C., the  Romans, not wanting  to  be dependent on Etruscan salt, founded  their  own saltworks  across  the  river  in  Ostia.  They built  a single, shallow pond to  hold seawater until the  sun evaporated  it into salt crystals.

The first of the great Roman roads, the Via Salaria, Salt Road, was built to  bring  this  salt not only to  Rome but across  the  interior  of the peninsula. This worked well in the Roman part of the Italian peninsula. But as Rome expanded, transporting salt longer distances by road became too costly. Not only did Rome want salt to be affordable for the people,  but,  more  importantly  as  the  Romans  became   ambitious empire  builders,  they  needed  it  to  be  available  for  the  army.  The Roman army required salt for its soldiers and for its horses and livestock. At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the  word salary and the  expression “worth his  salt” or “earning  his salt.”  In  fact,  the   Latin  word s a l became   the   French   word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier.

To the Romans, salt was a necessary part of empire building. They developed saltworks throughout their expanded world, establishing them on seashores, marshes, and brine springs throughout the Italian peninsula. By conquest they took  over  not only Hallstatt, Hallein, and the many Celtic works of Gaul and Britain but also the saltworks of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians in North Africa, Sicily, Spain, and Portugal.   They  acquired   Greek   works   and Black  Sea   works  and ancient Middle Eastern works including the saltworks of Mount Sodom by the Dead Sea.  More than sixty salt-works from the Roman Empire have been identified.

Romans boiled sea salt in pottery, which they broke after a solid salt block  had formed  inside.  Piles  of pottery shards  mark many ancient Roman sea salt sites throughout the Mediterranean. The Romans also pumped seawater into single ponds for solar evaporation, as in Ostia. They mined rock salt, scraped dry lake beds like African sebkhas, boiled the brine from marshes, and burned marsh plants to extract salt from the ashes.

None of these techniques were Roman inventions. Aristotle had mentioned    brine    spring    evaporation    in    the    fourth    century B.C. Hippocrates,  the  fifth-century-B. C . physician,  seems   to  have  known about solar-evaporated sea salt. He wrote, The sun attracts  the  finest  and lightest  part  of the  water  and carries   it   high   up;  the   saltiness   remains   because   of   its thickness and weight, and in this way the salt originates.

The Roman genius was administration—not the originality of the project but the scale of the operation.

THE ROMANS SALTED their greens, believing this to counteract the natural bitterness,  which  is  the  origin  of  the  word salad, salted.  The oldest surviving  complete  book of  Latin  prose,  Cato’s  second-century-B.C. practical guide  to  rural life, De  agricultura, suggests  eating  cabbage this way:

If  you want  your cabbage  chopped, washed, dried,  sprinkled with salt or vinegar, there is nothing healthier.

Salt  was served  at  the  table,  in a simple  seashell  at  a plebeian’s table or in an ornate silver saltcellar at a patrician’s feast. In fact, since salt  symbolized   the   binding   of  an  agreement,  the   absence   of  a saltcellar on a banquet table would have been interpreted as an unfriendly act and reason for suspicion.

Cato suggested testing brine for sufficient salinity to use in pickling by seeing  if an anchovy or an egg  would  float in it. The anchovy test has not endured, but the egg test remains the standard household technique throughout the Mediterranean. In northern Europe a floating potato is sometimes used.

Most  of the  salt  consumed by Romans was  already  in their  food when they bought it at the  market. Salt was even added to  wine  in a spicy mixture called defrutum, which, in the absence  of bottling corks, was used to  preserve  the  wine. This may explain why their food  was said to be extremely salty and yet the consumption of table salt was not remarkable.  In the  first  century A.D., Pliny estimated  that  the  average Roman citizen  consumed only 25 grams  of salt  a  day. The modern American consumes even less if the salt content of packaged food is not included.

The Romans used a great deal of salt in the  hams and other pork products that they seemed to have learned about from the Celts. Sausages—pork and other meats, preserved in salt, seasoned and stuffed  in  natural  casings  from  intestines,  bladders,  or  stomachs— were both imported from Gaul and made locally. The recipes for many of the French and Italian sausages of today date from Roman times.

Originally, hams and sausages were brought to Rome from the conquered  northern  empire.  According  to  Strabo,  the  well-traveled first-century-B.C. Greek  historian, the  most prized  ham in Rome came from the forests of Burgundy. At the time those forests were Celtic, but the  French,  who have  a  habit  of  claiming Celtic  history—they  have made  Vercingetorix  a  French  national  hero—insist  that  ham  is  a French invention, albeit from Celtic Gaul. But the Romans were importing   ham  from   numerous   Celtic   regions,   including   what   is present-day Germany. The hams of Westphalia, which were dried, salted, and then smoked with unique local woods—a recipe still followed today in Westphalia—were very popular with Romans.

Cato, like  many Romans, was a ham enthusiast. In fact, at a time when Romans  often  took  family  names  from  agriculture,  Cato  was called Marcus Porcius. Porky Marcus’s recipe for mothproof ham was an attempt to  produce  a Westphalia-type  product. The addition of oil and vinegar  was intended  to  reproduce  the  savage  taste  of the  wild north.

After buying  legs of pork cut off the  feet. ½ peck ground Roman salt per ham. Spread the salt in the base of a vat or jar, then place a ham with the skin facing downwards. Cover completely with salt. Then place  another  above  it  and cover  in  the  same  way.  Be careful not to let meat touch meat. Cover them all in the same way. When all are arranged, cover the top with salt so that no meat is seen, and level it off.

After  standing  in salt  for five  days, take  all hams out  with the salt. Put those that were above below, and so rearrange and replace. After a total of twelve days take out the hams, clean off all the  salt and hang in the  fresh air  for two  days. On the  third day clean off with a sponge, rub all over with oil, hang in smoke for two days. On the third day take down, rub all over with a mixture of oil and vinegar and hang in the meat store. Neither moths nor worms will attack it.—Cato, De agricultura, second century b.c.

OLIVES,  PRESERVED IN salt,  along  with the  older  idea,  crushed  into  oil, were staples of the Roman diet and a basic food of the working class. Patricians  ate  olives  at the  beginning  of a meal. For plebeians, they were the meal. Cato listed his workers’ provisions as bread, olives, wine, and salt. Despite their hardness, olives must be handpicked because    any  bruising   can  be   ruinous   in   the   pickling   process. Harvesting  olives  requires  so much care  that in ancient times  it  was believed that conditions were only auspicious for a successful harvest during the last quarter moon of each month.

The bruised or damaged fruit was cured for the workers, but the successfully gathered olives were cured in a variety of ways for sale. Apicius, the great Roman food writer, mentioned an olive called columbades that was cured in seawater.

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

Cato’s 2,200-year-old recipe, using repeated soakings to remove the oleuropeina, and then salt for lactic acid fermentation, is still one of the standard techniques. When he said “soaked sufficiently,” he neglected to mention that this takes days.

How green olives are conserved.

Before they turn black, they are to be broken and put into water.

The water  is  to  be changed frequently.  When they have soaked sufficiently they are drained, put in vinegar, and oil is added. 1.2 pound salt to 1 peck olives. Fennel and lentisk [the seeds  of the lentisk tree] are put up separately in vinegar. When you decide to mix them in, use quickly. Pack in preserving-jars. When you wish to use, take with dry hands.

FISH WAS THE centerpiece of Roman cuisine. When salted, it was also at  the  heart  of Roman commerce.  The Greek  physician  Galen,  who lived from A.D. 130 to 200, wrote about the Roman salt fish trade. Galen was the first to understand the significance of reading pulses, and his writings  on health and diet  were  a major influence  on medicine  well into the Middle Ages. It was not a coincidence that a physician would be writing about salt fish since, like salt, it was considered both a food and a medicine.

Galen described  Rome’s  ports  busy with ships  unloading  salt  fish from the eastern and western Mediterranean. He said that the best salt fish he knew was called sarda, but he also praised the tuna salted in Sardinia or in Gades, Spain, and salted mullet from the Black Sea. Sarda may refer to the small tuna now called bonito or Atlantic mackerel, or the  sardine, a small young pilchard, which is  a uniquely European fish. He also praised salt fish from Egypt and cured Spanish mackerel from the port of Sexi in southern Spain.

By Galen’s time, the centuries-old trade in both salted fish and fermented salt fish sauce had been well established in the Mediterranean. It had even been a topic of physicians before. But what struck Galen in the second century was that never before in history had the trade been so extensive and on such a massive scale.

IN  241 B.C., at  the  end of the  Punic  Wars,  when Phoenician Carthage was  crushed,  Sicily,  the  largest  island  in  the  Mediterranean,  came under Roman control. Sicily was known as the “breadbasket of Rome” for its  grain.  But  it  also  had valuable  fisheries.  Catching,  salt  curing, and selling  fish was the  major activity of the  entire  Sicilian coastline, and the most famous fish throughout the Mediterranean was the salted bluefin tuna.

The  Sicilians  made  salt  by  boiling  the  seawater  caught  in  the island’s many marshes. Excavations have revealed ancient salt-works concentrated in the western part of the island around Trapani  and on the  island  of Favignana. Not coincidentally, these  are  the  areas  from which the bluefin tuna is fished.

Archestratus,  the  Sicilian-born  fourth-century-B.C. Greek  poet  and gourmet, praised his native island’s tuna, both fresh and salted, stored in jars. Normally when a tuna was caught, the choice upper body parts were eaten fresh, and the drier tail meat was reserved for salting. But Archestratus offered an interesting compromise.

Take the tail of the female tuna—and I’m talking of the large female  tuna  whose mother city is Byzantium. Then slice  it and bake all of it  properly, simply sprinkling  it  lightly with salt  and brushing with oil. Eat the slices hot, dipping them into a sharp brine. They are good if you want to eat them dry, like the immortal gods in form and stature. If you serve it sprinkled with vinegar,  it  will  be  ruined.— Archestratus, The  Life  of  Luxury, fourth century b.c.

Archestratus also admired the Black Sea tuna coming from Byzantium, the  site  of present-day Istanbul. These  fish were  from the same schools. The bluefin passes  Sicily on its spawning journey to the Black  Sea.  In pre-Roman times,  the  Black  Sea  was a major fishing and salt fish area, especially for tuna, but also herring, sturgeon, flounder, mackerel, and anchovies. Herodotus singled out the salted sturgeon  of what  is  now the  Dnieper  River,  which  flows  through  the Ukraine into the Black Sea.

FROM THE  BLACK Sea  to  the  Strait  of  Gibraltar,  salt  production  was usually placed near fishing areas, creating industrial zones that produced  a range  of salt-based  products,  including  various  types  of salt fish, fish sauces, and purple dye.

Salsamentum, f r o m s a l , salt,  was  the   Roman  word   for  salted products. The most commercially important salsamentum was salt fish. Whereas the Greeks had developed an entire vocabulary for salt fish, describing  the  type  of cure, the  place  of origin, the  cut of fish, salted with   scales,   or   without   scales,   the   Romans   simply   spoke   of salsamentum, from which they made a good deal of money.

After the producers made all of these salsamenta, the scraps—the innards, the gills, and the tails—were used to make sauce. Roman writings  mention four classes  of sauce: garum,  liquamen, allec, and muria. The exact  meaning  of these  terms  has  been lost. Allec  may have been the leftover sludge after the sauce was strained. Garum and liquamen ended up being generic terms for fermented fish sauce.

To make the sauce, the fish scraps were put in earthen jars with alternating layers of salt and weighted on the top to keep them submerged  in the  pickle  that developed  as salt drew moisture  out of the  fish. Classics  scholars  have searched  for precise  ancient garum recipes,  but  the  clearest  are  medieval,  from Geoponica, a  Greek agricultural manual written about A.D. 900. It offered a number of garum recipes based on earlier sources:

The so-called liquamen is made in this manner: the intestines of fish are thrown into a vessel and salted. Small fish, either the best smelt,  or  small  mullet,  or  sprats,  or  wolffish,  or  whatever  is deemed   to   be   small,   are   all   salted   together   and,  shaken frequently, are fermented in the sun.

After it has been reduced in the heat, garum is obtained from it in this way: a large, strong basket is placed into the vessel of the aforementioned  fish,  and the  garum  streams  into  the  basket.  In this way the so-called liquamen is strained through the basket when it is taken up. The remaining refuse is allec. . . .

Next, if you wish to use the garum immediately, that is to say not ferment  it in  the  sun, but  to  boil it,  you do it  this  way. When the brine has been tested, so that an egg having been thrown in floats (if it sinks, it is not sufficiently salty), and throwing the fish into the brine in a newly-made earthenware pot and adding in some oregano, you place  it  on a sufficient fire  until  it is  boiled, that is until  it begins to reduce a little. Some throw in boiled-down must [unfermented  wine].  Next,  throwing  the  cooled  liquid into  a filter, you toss it a second and a third time through the filter until  it turns out clear. After having covered it, store it away.

Physicians saw in garum all of the health benefits of salt fish contained in a bottle. It was prescribed as a medicine or, more commonly, mixed  with other ingredients  to  make a medicine, usually for digestive disorders, and for such problems as sores, for which salt has clear  healing  powers.  But  it  was also  prescribed  for a range  of other ailments, including sciatica, tuberculosis, and migraine headaches.

The only other  place  in the  ancient  world to  use  garum  was Asia. The sauce appears to be, as some historians believe of the domesticated pig, an idea that occurred independently to the East and the  West. The Asian sauce  is thought to  have originated  in Vietnam, though the  Vietnamese  must  have taken it in  ancient  times  from the Chinese soy sauce, in those early times when the Chinese fermented fish with the beans.

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. Salt is also mixed with minced ginger root. But more popular than any of these, since ancient times, is mám a brine made from salting small  fish.  Unlike  the  Roman version,  Asian  garum  has  remained popular into modern times and is made virtually everywhere in Southeast Asia, including Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, and the Philippines, where it is called bagoong. In Thailand, where it is called nam pla, it is produced by more than 200 factories. The Koreans, the Chinese, the Japanese, even the Indians have variations.

for sixteen years,  from 1914 to  1930, to  understand  the fermentation process that Vietnamese peasants had been employing for centuries.  The two  necessary ingredients  were  fish and salt.  The fish were usually small ones of the Clupeidae family, to which herrings and  sardines   belong.  The  fish  sat   in  salt   for  three   days,  which produced  a  juice,  some of which  was  reserved  to  ripen  in the  sun, while the remainder was pressed with the fish to produce a mush. The two were then mixed together and left for three months, sometimes much longer. Then the solid parts were strained out.

THE ROMANS USED garum 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. The oldest cookbook still  in  existence, De  re  coquinaria—which  is  credited  to Apicius, though it appears to be a compilation of a number of Roman cooks from the  first  century A.D.—gives  far more  recipes  with garum than with salt. Garum was much more expensive than salt, but Apicius was  clearly  writing   for  the   upper  classes.  According   to   Seneca, Apicius committed suicide because,  having spent one tenth of a considerable fortune on his kitchen, he realized that he could not long continue in the style he had chosen.

The following recipe from Apicius is an example of the kind of elaborate molded dish that the Romans loved. It is seasoned with garum, and there is no other mention of salt in the dish.

[Place   cooked]   mallows,   leeks,   beets,   or   cooked   cabbage sprouts, roasted thrushes and quenelles of chicken, tidbits of pork or squab, chicken, and other similar shreds of fine meats that may be available. Arrange everything in alternating layers [in a mold].

Crush pepper and lovage [a bitter herb, common as parsley in ancient Rome] with two parts old wine, one part broth [garum], one part honey and a little oil. Taste it; and when well-mixed and in due proportions  put  in  a  sauce  pan and allow  to  heat  moderately; when boiling  add  a  pint  milk  in which  [about  eight]  eggs  have been dissolved;  pour over  [the  mold and heat  slowly but  do not allow to  boil] and when thickened  serve. [The  dish would  usually be unmolded before serving.]

A simpler recipe using garum instead of salt is that for braised cutlets:

Place the meat in a stew pan, add one pound of broth [garum], a like quantity of oil, a trifle of honey, and thus braise.

And here is one for a fish sauce:

Sauce  for roasted red mullet: pepper, lovage, rue [an aromatic evergreen], honey, pine nuts, vinegar, wine, garum, and a bit of oil. Heat and pour over the fish.

Although  this  style  of cooking  was  a kind of haute  cuisine  for the elite, costly garum was frequently described as “putrid,” which is to say rotten. “That liquid of putrefying matter,” said Pliny. Seneca,  the outspoken first-century philosopher, called  it “expensive  liquid of bad fish.” But his protégé, the poet Martial, apparently did not agree since he once sent garum with the note “accept this exquisite garum, a precious gift made with the first blood spilled from a living mackerel.”

But  Martial  was  probably  writing   about garum    sociorum, which means “garum among friends,” the most expensive garum, made exclusively from mackerel in Spain. Garum factories of varying standards  were  built  on the  coast  not  only  in Roman ports  such as Pompeii, but in southern Spain, the Libyan port of Leptis Magna, and in Clazomenae  in Asia  Minor. Since  the  Britons  both made salt  and exported  fish, it is  likely that England  too  was involved  in the  Roman salt fish and garum trade.

Many types  of  garum  were  made—even a  kosher  garum, garum castimoniale, for the sizable Jewish market in Roman-occupied Israel. Castimoniale, in accordance with Jewish dietary law, was guaranteed to have been made only from fish with scales. The usual fish for garum—tuna, sardines, anchovies, or mackerel—all have scales and are kosher. But it seems even in the first century, a rabbinical certification brought a better price.

As the market for garum grew, low-priced brands began to appear on the market. Slaves even made garum from household fish scraps. There  is  often  a thin line  between  pungent  and rotten,  and some of these  sauces  must have emitted  sickening  smells. Apicius  offered  a recipe for fixing garum that smelled bad.

If  garum  has  contracted  a  bad  odor,  place  a  vessel  upside down and fumigate it  with laurel and cypress and before ventilating it, pour the garum in the vessel. If this does not help matters, and if the taste is too pronounced, add honey and fresh spikenard [new shoots—novem spicum] to it; that will improve it. Also new must should be likewise effective.

WHEN  THE   ROMANS took  over  the   Phoenician  salt  fish  trade,  they discovered  how to  make their purple  dye. A logical byproduct of fish salting, the dye was produced by salting murex, a Mediterranean mollusk whose three-inch shell resembles a dainty whelk.

According to legend, the presence of this dye was discovered when Hercules took his sheepdog for a walk along the beach in Tyre. When the inquisitive dog bit into a shellfish, his mouth turned a strange dark color. From at least as early as 1500 B.C., this  dye brought wealth to merchants in Tyre.

The painstakingly extracted purple dye was a luxury item of such prestige  that  the  color  purple  became  a way of showing  wealth and power. Julius Caesar decreed that only he and his household could wear purple-trimmed togas. The high priests of Judaism, the Cohanim, dyed the fringes of their prayer shawls purple. Cleopatra dyed the sails of her warship purple. Virgil, the first-century-B.C. poet, wrote, “And let him  drink  from  a  jeweled  cup and sleep  on Sarran  purple,”  Sarran meaning “from Tyre.”

Pliny wrote that men were slaves to “luxury, which is a very great and influential power  inasmuch as  men scour  forests  for ivory and citrus- wood and all the rocks of Gaetulia (North Africa) for the murex and for purple.”

Romans who could afford it also ate murex, the ultimate luxury food, which they called  “purple  fish.” One recipe  called  for  it to  be served surrounded  by the  tiny  birds  known as  figpeckers.  It  is  still  eaten, steamed and twisted out of the shell with a pin, by the French, who call i t rocher, the  Spanish, who call it cañadilla, and the Portuguese, who call it búzio.

Pliny described the arduous process to obtain the dye:

There is a white vein with a very small amount of liquid  in it: . . . Men try to  catch the  murex alive  because  it  discharges  its  juice when it dies. They obtain the  juice  from the  larger purple-fish by removing the shell: they crush the smaller ones together with their shell, which is the only way to make them yield their juice. . . .

The vein already mentioned is removed, and to this, salt has to be  added  in  the  proportion  of  about  one  pint  for  every  100 pounds. It  should be left to dissolve for three days, since, the fresher the salt, the stronger it is. The mixture is then heated in a lead  pot  with about  seven gallons  of water  to  every fifty pounds and kept  at  a moderate  temperature  by a pipe  connected  to  a furnace  some distance  away. This  skims  off the  flesh which will have adhered to the veins, and after about nine days the cauldron is filtered and a washed fleece is dipped by way of a trial. Then the  dyers  heat  the  liquid   until  they  feel  confident  of  the  result.

—Gaius  Plinius  Secundus, Pliny  the  Elder, Historia  naturalis, first century A.D.

The nature of the precious liquid from which purple came would not be  entirely  understood  for  another  two  millennia.  In 1826, a  twenty- three-year-old student at the Ecole de Pharmacie, Antoine Jérôme Balard, after studying the composition of salt marshes, concluded that the  blackish-purplish,  foul-smelling  liquid present  in marsh water,  the residue  water  from which salt  crystals  had formed,  was a previously unidentified chemical element. Because  the liquid was identical to the purple secretion of the murex, he named the new element muride. The Académie Française, wary of having major discoveries come from students, thought at the  least it should  not let him give  the  name. So they changed muride to bromine, a word meaning “stench.”

Murex was  made in much of the  Roman Mediterranean,  in North Africa,  on the  Mediterranean  coast  of  Gaul.  Mountains  of  ancient murex shells from Roman times have been found in the Israeli  port of Accra. Between this stinking bromine solution from the dyeworks and the  smell  of fish being  cured,  the  Roman Empire  must  have  had a redolent coast.

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 to rot was not an idea that endured in less extravagant cultures. Of course when garum was made properly, the salt prevented rotting until the fermentation took hold. But it  became  increasingly difficult  to  convince  people  of this. Anthimus, living in sixth-century Gaul, in a culture that was leaving Rome behind, rejected garum for salt or even brine:

Loin of pork is best eaten roasted, because  it is a good food and well digested, provided that, while it is roasting, it is spread with feathers dipped in brine. If the loin of pork is rather tough when eaten, it is  better to  dip  in pure  salt. We ban the  use of fish     sauce     from     every     culinary     role.—A n t h i m i s , De obseruatione ciborum (On the Observance of Foods),  circa A.D.500

Anthimus’s pronouncement on garum has echoed through Western cooking: “Nam liquamen ex omni parte prohibemus,” We ban the use of garum from every culinary role.

Sardines, which got their name from being a highly praised salt fish cured in Sardinia, were favored for garum. Gargilius Martialis, writing in the third century A.D., specified sardines for making garum. Modern divers examining a shipwreck off of southeastern Sicily found fifty Roman amphorae  containing  salted  sardines.  But  in later  centuries, sardines became better appreciated fresh with a sprinkling of salt.

Sardines: In their natural state they should be fried; when done, garnish them with orange  juice  and a little  of the  frying oil and salt;  they  are   eaten  hot.—Cuoco    Napoletano, anonymous, Naples, late 1400s

After the fall of Rome, garum vanished from the Mediterranean, the region lost its importance as a salt fish producer, and the purple dye industry faded. But the Roman idea that building saltworks was part of building empires endured.

CHAPTER FIVE

Salting It Away in the Adriatic

THE  FALL   OF the  Roman Empire  left  the  Mediterranean,  the  most economically important region of the Western world, without a clear leader but with many aspirants. The region was the most competitive it had been since the rise of the Phoenicians.

The entire coast of the Mediterranean was studded with saltworks, some small local operations, others big commercial enterprises such as the ones in Constantinople and the Crimea. The ancient Mediterranean  saltworks  that  had been started  by the  Phoenicians, like power itself, passed from Romans to Byzantines to Muslims.

The saltworks that the Romans had praised remained the most valued.   Egyptian   salt   from   Alexandria   was   highly   appreciated, especially their fleur de sel, the light crystals skimmed off the surface of the water. Salt from Egypt, Trapani, Cyprus, and Crete all had great standing because they had been mentioned by Pliny in Roman times.

VENICE,  THE ONE Italian  city  that  was  not  part  of Roman history,  was settled on islands in the lagoons in the Adriatic. The coast of Venetia was substantially different than it is today. A series of sandbars, called lidi, sheltered lagoons from the storms of the Adriatic. These lagoons stretched  from  Ravenna,  the  commercial  and political  center  of  the

Venetian  coast,  up the  estuary  of  the  Po  River  to  Aquileia,  on the opposite  side  of the  Adriatic  next  to  Trieste.  Lido  has  become  the name of a sandbar in Venice, particularly popular with the  hordes  of tourists who now wander the streets and canals of that city. But even in Roman times,  the  lidi  were  for  tourists,  summer  resorts  for  affluent Romans.

In  the   sixth  century,  the   mainland,  what  had  been  the   Roman province of Veneto, was invaded by Germanic tribes. To preserve their independence, small groups of people, like Bostonians fleeing to Martha’s  Vineyard,  moved to  the  islands  protected  by their  summer vacation lidi.

Cassiodorus, a sixth-century high Roman official turned monastic scholar, admired these settlements in the lagoons. He likened their houses, part on land and part on sea, to aquatic birds.

Rich and poor live together in equality. The same food and similar  houses  are  shared  by all;  wherefore  they cannot  envy each other’s  hearths, and so they are  free  from the  vices  that rule the world. All your emulation centers on the saltworks; instead of ploughs and scythes, you work rollers [for salt production] whence comes all your gain. Upon your industry all other  products  depend for,  although  there  may be  someone who does  not  seek  gold,  there  never  yet  lived  the  man who does  not  desire  salt,  which  makes  every  food  more  savory.

—Cassiodorus, A.D. 523.

As with Rome, Venetian democracy was more  of an ideal  than a practice. But, though Cassiodorus may have been overly enthusiastic about Venetian egalitarianism, the importance that he attributed to salt in Venice was not exaggerated. Salt was the key to a policy that made Venice the dominant commercial force of southern Europe.

The  Italian  mainland  was  originally  much farther  away  from  the islands  that  are  now the  city  of  Venice.  The  area  between  these islands and the peninsula of Comacchio was called the Seven Seas. “To sail the seven seas” meant simply sailing the Seven Seas— accomplishing the daunting task of navigating past the sandbars of those treacherous twenty-five miles.

A b o ut A. D . 600,  Venetians   started   using   landfill   to   extend   the mainland closer to the islands of modern-day Venice. The Seven Seas became  a landmass with a port named Chioggia. Below it, in a now much-narrowed  lagoon, was Comacchio, overlooking  the  delta  of the Po.  Ravenna,  formerly  a  port,  became  an inland  city,  and  nearby Cervia became its port.

By the  seventh century,  with the  Seven  Seas  gone, the  Venetians built salt ponds along the newly formed land of Chioggia. Cassiodorus wrote that the Venetians were using “rollers,” but sometimes this is translated as “tubes” or “cylinders.” It is not clear if he was speaking of rollers  to  smooth  down the  floors  of  artificial  evaporation  ponds or cylindrical pottery to  boil seawater into  crystals. Both techniques  had been common  in Rome.

Between the sixth and ninth centuries, the last great technical advance in salt manufacturing until the twentieth century was invented. Instead  of trapping  seawater  in a single  artificial pond, closing  it  off, and waiting for the sun to evaporate the water, the salt makers built a series of ponds. The first, a large open tank, had a system of pumps and sluices that moved the  pond’s seawater to the next pond, after it reached a heightened salinity. There the water evaporated further, and a still  denser  brine  was moved to  the  next  pond. At  the  same  time, fresh seawater was let into the first pond so that a fresh batch of brine was always  beginning.  When brine  reaches  a sufficient  density,  salt precipitates out—it crystalizes, and the crystals fall to the bottom of the pond, where they can be scooped out. In a pond with only solar heat, it may take a year or more for seawater to reach this density. But given sufficient sun and wind and a season dry enough not to  have rainfall dilute the ponds, the only  limit to production is the available area, the number of ponds that can operate simultaneously. It requires little equipment, a very small investment, and, except for the final scraping stage, the harvest, little manpower.

Some Western historians believe that the Chinese may have been the   first   to   develop   this   technique   around A. D . 500.  But  Chinese historians, who are loath to pass  up founder’s rights to any invention, lay no claim to  this  one. The Chinese  were  not pleased  with the  salt produced  by this  technique.  Slow  evaporation results  in coarse  salt, and the Chinese have always considered fine-grained salt to be of higher quality.

The idea of successive evaporation ponds seems to have started in the  Mediterranean, where  coarse  salt was valued  for salting  fish and curing hams. The North African Muslims operating in the early Middle Ages  throughout  the  Mediterranean  may have  been the  first  to  use such a system, introducing it to Ibiza in the ninth century.

By the tenth century, multiple ponds were being used on the Dalmatian coast, across the Adriatic from Venice. In 965, ponds were built in Cervia, and by the eleventh century, the Venetians had built a pond system.

Venice  had  intense  competition  on its  little  strip  of  the  Adriatic. Close   to   Venice’s   Chioggia   was  Comacchio,  where   Benedictine monks produced salt. In 932, the Venetians ended that competition by destroying the saltworks at Comacchio. But this served to strengthen the position of the third important saltworks in the area, Cervia, controlled by the archbishop of the nearby no-longer-coastal city of Ravenna.

For a time the two principal salt competitors in the region were the commune of Venice  and the  archbishop  of Ravenna—Chioggia  and Cervia.  Venice   had  the   advantage   because   Chioggia   was  more productive  than  Cervia.  But  Chioggia  produced sali minutti,  a  fine- grained salt. When Venetians wanted coarser salt, they had to import it. Then, in the  thirteenth century, after  a series  of floods  and storms destroyed about a third of the ponds in Chioggia, the Venetians were forced to import even more salt.

That was when the  Venetians  made an important discovery. More money could  be  made  buying  and  selling  salt  than  producing  it.

Beginning in 1281, the government paid merchants a subsidy on salt landed in Venice from other areas. As a result, shipping salt to Venice became  so  profitable  that  the  same  merchants  could  afford  to  ship other goods at prices that undersold their competitors. Growing fat on the  salt subsidy, Venice  merchants  could  afford to  send ships  to  the eastern  Mediterranean,  where  they  picked  up valuable  cargoes  of Indian spices and sold them in western Europe at low prices that their non-Venetian competitors could not afford to offer.

This  meant  that  the  Venetian  public  was  paying  extremely  high prices  for  salt,  but  they  did  not  mind  expensive  salt  if  they  could dominate  the  spice  trade  and be  leaders  in  the  grain  trade.  When grain  harvests  failed  in Italy,  the  Venetian  government  would  use its salt   income   to   subsidize   grain   imports   from   other   parts   of   the Mediterranean and thereby corner the Italian grain market.

Unlike  the  Chinese  salt monopoly, the  Venetian government never owned salt but simply took a profit from  regulating its trade. Enriched by its share of sales on high-priced salt, the salt administration could offer loans to finance other trade. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries,  a  period  when Venice  was  a  leading  port  for  grain  and spices,  between  30 and  50 percent  of  the  tonnage  of  imports  to Venice  was in salt. All salt  had to  go through government  agencies. The Camera Salis issued licenses that told merchants not only how much salt they could export but to where and at what price.

The salt administration also maintained Venice’s palatial public buildings and the complex hydraulic system that prevented the metropolis  from  washing  away.  The  grand  and  cherished  look  of Venice, many of its statues and ornaments, were financed by the salt administration.

Venice carefully built its reputation as a reliable supplier, and so contracts with the merchant state were desirable. Venice was able to dictate  terms  for  these  contracts.  In  1250, when Venice  agreed  to supply Mantua and Ferrara with salt, the contract stipulated that these cities would not buy salt from anyone else. This became the model for Venetian salt contracts.

As Venice became the salt supplier to more and more countries, it needed more and more salt producers from which to buy it. Merchants financed by the salt administration went farther into the Mediterranean, buying   salt   from  Alexandria,   Egypt,   to   Algeria,   to   the   Crimean peninsula in the Black Sea, to Sardinia, Ibiza, Crete, and Cyprus. Wherever they went, they tried to dominate the supply, control the saltworks, even acquire it if they could.

Producing  salt for the  Venetian fleet was hard work—moving  mud and rocks, clearing and preparing ponds, building the dikes that separated  them,  carrying  heavy  sacks  of  harvested  crystal.  Often entire  families—husband,  wife,  and children—labored  together.  They were paid by the amount of salt they harvested.

Venice manipulated markets by controlling production. In the late thirteenth century, wishing to raise the world market price, Venice had all saltworks  in Crete  destroyed  and banned the  local  production  of salt. The Venetians then brought in all the salt needed for local consumption, built stores to sell the imported salt, and paid damages to the owners of saltworks. The policy was designed to control prices and at the  same time  keep the  locals happy. But two  centuries  later, when a salt fleet en route from Alexandria was lost at sea, the farmers of Crete were in a crisis because  salt was so scarce on the island that they could no longer make cheese,  which is curdled milk drained and preserved in salt.

In 1473, Venice acquired Cervia, forcing the onetime rival to agree to sell to no one but them. An exception was negotiated for Cervia to continue  supplying  Bologna  in the  nearby Po Valley.  When Venice’s new  archrival,   Genoa,  made  the   island   of  Ibiza   the   largest   salt producer in the Mediterranean, the Venetians made Cyprus into the second largest producer. In 1489, Cyprus officially became a Venetian possession.

Aiding its ability to ruthlessly manipulate commerce and control territory, Venice maintained the ships of the merchant fleet as a naval reserve  and called  them  into  combat  where  needed.  The Venetian navy patrolled the Adriatic, stopped ships, inspected cargo, and demanded licensing  documents  to  make sure  all commercial  traffic was conforming with its regulations.

No state had based its economy on salt to the degree Venice had or established as extensive a state salt policy except China. Possibly this was not entirely a coincidence, since  Venetian policy was influenced by one of its best-known families, the Polos.

IN 1260, NICCOLÒ Polo and his brother Maffeo, both Venice merchants— Venice was by then a city of international merchants—left on a commercial  trip  to  the  court  of Kublai  Khan, a  dynamic  leader  who ruled  the  Mongols  and had just  conquered  China.  They returned  in 1269 with letters  and messages  from Kublai  Khan to  the  pope. The khan asked  for  more Westerners, intellectuals, and leaders in Christian thought to come to his court and teach them about the West. Two years  later  the  Polo  brothers  went  on a  second  trip,  this  time taking with them Niccolòs seventeen-year-old son Marco and two Dominican monks. The Dominicans abandoned the arduous trek, but Marco stayed on with his father and uncle.

If his account is true, no teenager ever went on a better adventure. They traveled the Silk Road across central Asia and the Tarim basin and, four years after leaving Venice, arrived in Shando, or as the poet Samuel  Taylor  Coleridge  called  it in  his  famous  poem, Xanadu, the summer capital of Kublai Khan, the emperor of the Mongols. The khan, at least by Marco’s account, was not disappointed that the Polo brothers had returned with no greater emissary of Western knowledge than Niccolò’s  young son. Marco  traveled  throughout the  vast empire the  khan had  conquered,  learned  languages,  studied  cultures,  and reported back to Kublai Khan.

Almost twenty-five years later, in 1295, the Polos returned to a Venice,  where  few,  even in  their  own household,  recognized  them. Three   years   after   his   return,   Marco   Polo,   like   other   Venetian merchants, was serving in a naval fleet at war with the Venetian rival, Genoa. He was taken prisoner  and supposedly dictated  the  story of his  adventures  to  a  fellow  prisoner  named Rusticello,  a  fairly  well known author of adventure tales from Pisa.

There are a number of problems with Rusticello. He may have taken great  liberties  to  improve  on the  story.  Whole  passages appear  to have been borrowed  from his  previous  books, which were  imaginary romantic adventures. For example, the arrival of the Polos at the court of Kublai Khan bears a disturbing resemblance to the account of Tristan’s arrival in Camelot in Rusticello’s book on King Arthur.

From its initial publication in 1300, the Venetians were suspicious. Some questioned if Marco Polo had ever gone to China at all. Why did he write nothing of the Great Wall, about the drinking of tea, about princesses with bound feet? It seemed odd to the few knowledgeable Venetians, and it has seemed suspicious to subsequent scholars that Marco   Polo   completely  missed   the   fact   that   China   had  printing presses in an age when this pivotal invention had not yet been seen in Europe. This  omission seemed  even more  glaring  to  Venetians  150 years later, once Johannes Gutenberg introduced movable type to Europe, and Venice became a leading printing center.

His book was full of unheard-of details and was missing many of the facts known to other merchants. But later travelers to China were able to verify some of the curious details of Marco Polo’s book. And he had been away somewhere  for twenty-five  years. Polo’s account sparked an interest in Chinese trade among many Europeans, including Christopher   Columbus,   and  remained   the   basis   of   the   Western concept of China until the ninteenth century. His legend has grown.

It is widely accepted that he introduced Italians to pasta. It is true that China at the time, and still today, abounded in fresh and dried, flat and stuffed  pastas.  But  Marco  Polo’s  book says  almost  nothing  about pasta other than the fact, which he found very curious, that it was sometimes   made  from   a   flour  ground   from   the   fruit  of   a   tree.

Maccheroni, one of the  oldest Italian words for pasta, appears to  be from Neopolitan dialect and was used before Marco Polo’s return. The word is mentioned in a book from Genoa dated 1279. Most Sicilians are certain that the first pasta came from their island, introduced by the Muslim  conquerors  in  the  ninth  century.  The  hard  durum  wheat  or semolina used to make pasta was grown by the ancient Greeks, who may have made some pasta dishes, and the Romans ate something similar  to  lasagna.  The  word lasagna may come  from  the  ancient Gre e k lagana,  meaning  “ribbon,”  or  from  the  ancient  Greek  word lasanon,  which  probably  would  not  make the  dish  Greek  since  the word  means  “chamber  pot.”  The Romans, according  to  this  theory, started using lasanon—presumably not the same ones but perhaps a similarly shaped vessel—as a pot for baking a noodle dish.

Marco Polo never mentioned that the Chinese printed paper money, but it is more significant that he did describe how in Kain-du salt cakes made with images of the khan stamped on them were used for money.

Among the unexpected details in Polo’s book are many on salt and the Chinese  salt  administration.  Polo  described  travelers  journeying  for days  to  get  to  hills  where  the  salt  was  so  pure  it  could  simply  be chipped  away. He wrote  of the  revenue  earned  by the  emperor from the  brine  springs  in the  province  of Karazan,  how salt  was made in

Changli to the profit of both the private and public sector, how Koigan- zu made salt and the  emperor derived  revenues  from it. Marco Polo seldom mentioned salt without pointing out the state revenues derived by the emperor.

Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant and may have been genuinely interested in salt and the way it was administered. He also may have decided that, since his readership would be Venice merchants, this would be a subject of great interest to them. But it also could be that whether he had gone to China or not, one of his motivations for writing the book was to encourage the Venetian government to extend its salt administration, especially in possessions around the Mediterranean.

The extent of Marco Polo’s influence is difficult to measure, but it is clear that Venice, like the khan, did extend its salt administration and derive great wealth and power from it.

CHAPTER SIX

Two Ports and the Prosciutto in Between

WHAT WAS IT about this not especially salty stretch of the Adriatic that made Venetians get into the salt trade, along with the merchants of Cervia, the monks at Comacchio, and the archbishop of Ravenna?  It was not so much the sea in their faces as the river at their backs. The Po starts in the Italian Alps and flows straight across the peninsula, spreading into a marshy estuary from Ravenna  to Venice. The valley of the Po is an anomaly of the Italian peninsula, so strikingly different that its uniqueness becomes apparent after a moment’s glance at a map of Italy. With the Alps to the north and the sylvan mountains of Tuscany to the south, one thick ribbon of rich, rolling green pastures stretches coast to coast along the Po. A haven for agriculture, this has always been the  most  affluent  area  in Italy,  and today,  known as Emilia- Romagna, it still is.

The Romans  built a road, the Via Emilia—today it is the eight-lane A-1 superhighway—connecting  what became the centers  of culture and commerce  from Piacenza  to  Parma  to  Reggio  to Modena  to Bologna and on to the Adriatic coast. The agricultural wealth of this region depended on both a port for its goods and a source of salt for its agriculture. By competing for this business, two fiercely commercial competitors at opposite ends of the Po, Genoa on the Mediterranean and Venice on the Adriatic, became  two of the greatest ports of the Middle Ages.

On the rich plains of Emilia-Romagna, off of the great Roman road, are the ruins of a Roman city named Veleia. Historians have puzzled over Veleia because the Romans had a clear set of criteria for the sites of their cities and Veleia does not fit them. Not only is it too far from the road, it is on the cold windward side of a mountain. But it has one thing in common with almost every important city in Italy: It is near a source  of salt.  Veleia  was built over  underground  brine springs, which  is   why it   came  to   be  known as  the   big   salt   place, Salsomaggiore.

The earliest  record  of salt  production  in Veleia  dates  from  the second  century B.C. Like many other saltworks, it was abandoned after the  fall of  the  Roman Empire.

Charlemagne,  the  conquering  Holy Roman emperor who, like the Romans  before him, had an army that needed salt, started it up again. The name Salso first appears on an 877 document. In ancient times the brine wells had a huge wheel with slats inside and out for footing. Two men, chained at the neck, walked inside on the bottom, stepping from slat to slat, and two other men, also chained at the neck, did the same on the outside on top. The wheel turned a shaft that wrapped a rope, which hoisted buckets of brine. The brine was then boiled, which meant that a duke or lord who wished to control the brine wells had to also control a wide area of forest to provide wood for fuel.

Starting in the eleventh century, the Pallovicino family controlled the wells and the region. But in 1318, the city of Parma took over thirty-one Pallovicino wells. The event was considered important enough to be recorded in a fresco in the city palace. He who controlled the brine wells at  Salsomaggiore  controlled  the  region,  and the  takeover  of these thirty-one brine wells marked the transfer of power from feudal lord to city government.

IN THE SEVENTH and eighth centuries, before Charlemagne restarted the wells  at  Salsomaggiore,  sailors  brought  salt  from  the  Adriatic  to Parma. For this labor they could receive either money or goods, including  Parma’s  most  famous  salt  product,  ham—prosciutto di Parma.

Parma was a good place to make ham because  before the sea air reaches Parma it is caught in the mountain peaks, producing rain and drying out the wind that comes down to the plain. That dry wind is needed for aging the salted leg in a place dry enough to avoid rotting. The drying racks for the hams were always arranged east to west to best use the wind.

Bartolomeo Sacchi, a native of the Po Valley town of Cremona, who became a well-known fifteenth-century author under  the  pen name Platina,  gave blunt  and easily  followed  instructions  for testing  the quality of a ham:

Stick a knife into the middle of a ham and smell it. If it smells good, the ham will be good; if bad, it should be thrown away.

The sweet-smelling ham of Parma earned a reputation throughout Italy that was credited not only to the region’s dry wind but to the diet of their pigs, a diet which came from the local cheese industry. The Po Valley, where butter is preferred to olive oil, is Italy’s only important dairy region. According to Platina, this was more a matter of necessity than taste.

Almost all who inhabit the northern and western regions use it [butter] instead of fat or oil in certain dishes because  they lack oil, in which the warm and mild regions customarily abound. Butter is warm and moist, nourishes the body a good deal and is fattening, yet the stomach is injured by its frequent use.

Notice that Platina listed butter’s fattening quality as a virtue, although he was a writer who tended to look for the unhealthy in food including salt, about which he wrote:

“It is not good for the stomach except for arousing the appetite. Its immoderate use also harms the liver, blood, and eyes very much.”

And he was not much more sanguine about the pride of his native region, aged cheese.

Fresh  cheese is  very nourishing,  represses  the  heat  of the stomach, and helps those spitting blood, but it is totally harmful to the phlegmatic. Aged cheese is difficult to digest, of little nutriment, not good for stomach or belly, and produces  bile, gout,  pleurisy,  sand grains,  and stones.  They say a small amount, whatever you want, taken after a meal, when  it seals the  opening of  the  stomach, both  takes away the squeamishness of fatty dishes and benefits digestion.

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 origin  of  cheese is  uncertain.  It  may be  as  old  as  the domestication of animals. All that is needed for cheese is milk and salt, and since domesticated animals require salt, that combination is found most everywhere. Just as goats and sheep were domesticated earlier than cattle, it is thought that goat’s and sheep’s milk cheeses are much older ideas than cow’s milk cheese. The habit of carrying liquids in animal skins may have caused the first cheeses since milk coming in contact with an animal skin will soon curdle.

Soon, herders,  probably shepherds,  found  a more  sophisticated variation known as rennet. Rennet contains rennin, an enzyme  in the stomach of mammals which curdles milk to make  it digestible. Usually, rennet is made  from the lining of the stomach of an unweaned young animal because unweaned animals have a higher capacity to break down milk. Here, too, salt played a role because  these stomach linings were preserved in salt so that rennet from calving season would be usable throughout the year.

The  Romans  made  a  tremendous   variety   of   cheeses,  with differences not only from one area to another  but from one cheese maker to another in the same place and possibly even from one batch to another from the same cheese  maker.

Parmesan cheese, now called Parmigiano-Reggiano because  it is made in the green pastureland between Parma and Reggio, may have had its origins in Roman  times, but the earliest surviving record of a Parma  cheese  that  fits  the  modern   description   of  Parmigiano- Reggiano is from the thirteenth century. It was at this time that marsh areas were drained, irrigation ditches built, and the acreage devoted to rich pastureland greatly expanded. About the same time, standards were  established  by local  cheese makers  that  have been rigidly followed ever since. Parma cheese earned an international reputation and  became  a  profitable   export,   which    it   remains.   Giovanni Boccaccio, the fourteenth-century Florentine father of Italian prose, mentions it in The Decameron. In the fifteenth century, Platina called it the leading  cheese of Italy. Samuel Pepys, the seventeenth-century English diarist, claimed  to have saved his  from the London  fire by burying it in the backyard. Thomas Jefferson had it shipped to him in Virginia.

In Parma, the production of cheese, ham, butter, salt, and wheat evolved into a perfect symbiotic relationship. 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  of the Po determined that selling dairy products was far more profitable than selling milk.

The local farmers milked their cows in the evening, and this milk sat overnight at the cheese maker’s. In the  morning, they milked them again. The cheese makers skimmed the cream off the milk from the night before, and the resulting skim milk was mixed with the morning whole milk. The skimmed-off cream was used to make butter.

Heating the mixed milk, they added rennet and a bucket of whey, the leftover liquid after the  milk curdled  in the  cheese making  the day before. They then heated the new mixture to a higher temperature, still well below boiling, and left it to rest for forty minutes.

At this point the milk had curdled, leaving an almost clear, protein- rich liquid, and this whey was fed to pigs. It became  a requirement of prosciutto di Parma that it be made from pigs that had been fed the whey from Parmesan cheese. Less choice parts of pigs fed on this whey qualified to be sent to the nearby town of Felino, where they were ground up and made into salami. (The word salami is derived from the Latin verb to salt.)

The cheese makers also mixed whey with whole milk once a week to make fresh ricotta. By tradition ricotta was made on Thursday so that  the  cheese  would  be  ready  for  Sunday’s  traditional tortelli d’erbette.  Erbette literally means “grass,” but in Parma it is also the name of a local green similar to Swiss chard. Tortelli d’erbette is a ravioli-like pasta stuffed with ricotta, Parmigiano cheese, erbette, salt, and two spices that were a passion in the thirteenth century and highly profitable cargo for the ships of both Venice and Genoa: black pepper and nutmeg. Tortelli d’erbette was and still is served with nothing but butter and grated Parmigiano cheese.

Before  it succumbed   to  being  heavily salted,  butter was a rare delicacy. That was especially true in the  Po Valley at the southern extreme of butter’s range in Europe. In the Parma area, butter was a privilege of the cheese masters—theirs to distribute or sell, generally at high prices. Butter is still sold in the Parmigiano-Reggiano area by cheese masters.

Stuffed pasta in butter sauce worked particular well in this region where  the local wheat was soft, different from the rest of Italy, and produced a pasta that, when mixed with eggs, was rich and supple when fresh, but brittle and unworkable when dried. Dried pasta, like olive oil, belonged to the rest of Italy.

Each creamery had a cheese master whose hands reached into the copper vats and ran through the whey with knowing fingers, scooping up and pressing the curds as they were forming. When he said the cheese was done, a cheesecloth was put into the vat, and under his direction the corners of the cloth were lifted, hoisting from the whey more than 180 pounds of drained curd. While the others struggled to suspend  the mass in the cheesecloth, only the cheese master was allowed to take the big, flat, two-handed knife and divide the mass in two.

The two cheeses were left one day in cheesecloth and then put in wooden molds. The Latin word for a wooden cheese mold, forma, is the root of the Italian word for cheese,  formaggio. After at least three days, the ninety-pound cheeses were  floated in a brine bath turned every day. The aging of cheese is a matter of its slow absorption of salt. It takes two years for the salt to reach the center of a wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. After that the cheese  begins to dry out.

So these cheeses have always had one year of life between when they are sold and when they are considered too hard and dry, even too salty.  Platina’s  admonition about  aged cheese may have been a concern about overly aged cheese.

Prosciutto  makers  used salt  from  Salsomaggiore,  but  cheese makers used sea salt supplied either by Venice or by Genoa. In the sixteenth century, the powerful Farnesi  family arranged  5,000  mule caravans to carry salt from Genoa’s Ligurian coast, known today as the  Italian  Riviera.  Caravans  from  Genoa  carried  salt  inland  to Piacenza, where it was placed on river barges and carried down the Po to Parma. Unlike in Africa or ancient Rome, no single salt route was established.  Each caravan  had to  devise  a route  based on arrangements with the feudal lords along the way.

Inland cities  of the Po Valley such as Parma  had their own salt policies and derived revenue from the import of Venetian or Genoese salt,  a cost  which was passed on to  their  local  consumers.  This created  a permanent salt  contraband  trade  along  the  back routes between Genoa, Piacenza, Parma, Reggio, Bologna, and Venice.

In exchange for the  salt,  the  Po Valley traded  its salt  products:

salami, prosciutto, and cheese. It also traded its famous soft wheat for salt. The trade changed  with the times. In the eighteenth century, when the Bourbons ruled Parma, they traded their French luxury items for salt, but they also exchanged galley slaves for salt with Genoa, which needed galley slaves for its expanding trade empire. In Parma, a ten-year prison sentence could be reduced to five years as a galley slave on a Genoese ship. But most of these slaves lived only two years, which caused  a constant need for replacements.

IN THE FIFTH century B.C., before Genoa was Roman, it was the thriving port of a local people called the Ligurians. It was taken by Rome, by Carthage, by Rome again, by Germanic tribes, by Muslims. Finally, in the  twelfth century  it became, like Venice, an independent city-state dedicated to commerce.

Genoa bought salt from Hyères near Toulon in French Provence. The name Hyères  means “flats”  and probably  refers  to  salt  flats, because as far back as is known, salt was produced in this place. But in the twelfth century, Genoese merchants turned Hyères into an important producer by building a system of solar evaporation ponds. Genoa’s success in Hyères led to the decline of Pisa’s Sardinian salt trade. Genoese salt merchants then moved  into Sardinia, developed the saltworks of Cagliari, again building a system of evaporation ponds, and made Sardinia one of the largest salt producers in the Mediterranean.

The Genoese also bought salt from Tortosa on the Mediterranean coast of Iberia, south of Barcelona. Tortosa is at the mouth of the Ebro River, which gave  it a water connection from Catalonia through Aragon to Basque country—a  waterway through the most economically developed  parts  of the Iberian Peninsula. Tortosa  had been a salt producer  for  the  Moors,  but  by the  twelfth  century,  when Genoa became involved, it was one of the principal suppliers  of the port of Barcelona as well as Aragon.

In the mountainous interior of Catalonia, the dukes of Cardona were not happy to see the Genoese selling salt in Barcelona. In 886, a man about whom little is known except possibly his appearance, Wilfredo the Hairy rebuilt an abandoned eighth-century castle on a mountain fifty miles  inland  from  Barcelona.  Alone  on what  was then  a  distant mountaintop, the highest peak in a rugged, sparsely populated area, he could peer from the thick stone ramparts at his prize possession, the source of his wealth, the next mountain.

This next mountain was striped in pattern and colors so lively, it was almost dizzying to look at it—salmon pink rock with white, taupe, and bloodred  stripes.  It  was all  salt.  Since  salt  is  soluble  in  water, elongated facets were cut into the mountain by each rainfall. Inside the mine the pink-striped shafts were ornamented by snow-white crystal stalactites, long dangling  tentacles  where  the salt  had sealed  over dripping rainwater  from fissures above. The salt mountain was by a winding river, a shallow tributary of the Ebro. Rich green plains and gentle  terraced  slopes  were  farmed  in the  distance,  and on the horizon, the snow-crested peaks of the Pyrenees could be seen.

The lords who occupied the castle were the owners of the mountain. A dank brown  village  of  salt  workers  sprang  up on an adjacent mountain. On Thursdays, the salt workers were allowed to take salt for themselves. Starting at least in the sixteenth century, salt workers carved figurines, often religious, from the rock, which has the appearance of pink marble. Soft and soluble, rock salt is easy to carve and even easier to polish.

Even in the area around the salt mountain, all but the top two to three feet of soil is salt, and the white powder leaches to the surface when it rains. There is evidence that people took salt from here as far back as 3500 B.C. Prehistoric stone tools have been found—six-inch-long black rocks with one end serving as a pick and the other as a scraping tool.

The first written record of salt in Cardona is from the Romans, who usually favored sea salt but considered Cardona’s rock salt to be of high quality. In the ninth century, the dukes of Cardona, along with the other feudal lords of the Catalan-speaking area, were united under the counts of Barcelona. Catalonia, with its own Latin-based  language, became an important commercial  power whose territory extended along the Mediterranean coast from north of the Pyrenees to southern Spain.

Cardona was known in medieval Catalonia as an ideal source of salt  for making  hams and sausages. From  the capital,  the  port of Barcelona, Cardona salt was exported to Europe and became one of the leading rock salts in the Middle Ages. But by the twelfth century, Genoa could bring salt by sea to Barcelona less expensively than the dukes of Cardona could  bring  it across the fifty-mile land route. As Cardona salt merchants started to lose their Barcelona market, they too began selling their salt to the Genoese.

AFTER 1250, GENOA went even farther into the Mediterranean, buying salt in the Black Sea, North Africa, Cyprus, Crete, and Ibiza—many of the same saltworks that Venice was trying to dominate. Genoa built Ibiza into the largest salt producer in the region.

Salt was the engine of Genoese trade. With the salt the Genoese bought, they made salami, which was sold in southern Italy for raw silk, which was sold in Lucca  for fabrics, which were sold to the silk center of Lyon. Genoa competed with Venice not only for salt but for the other cargoes that were exchanged for salt, such as textiles and spices.

The Genoese were pioneers in maritime  insurance, banking, and the use of huge Atlantic-sized ships, which they bought or leased from the  Basques, in Mediterranean  trade.  These ships,  with their  vast cargo holds, had room for salt on a return voyage. Wherever they went for trade, they made a point of getting control of a saltworks at which to load up for the return trip.

But  Venice  was winning  the  competition  because of  a  more cohesive  political organization  and because of  its  system  of  salt subsidies. When this salt competition led to a war in 1378–80, known as the War of Chioggia, Venice’s ability to convert its commercial fleet into warships proved decisive. Venice defeated Genoa, its only major competitor for commercial dominance of the Mediterranean.

Yet among those who finally undid the maritime empire of Venice were  two  Genoese—Cristoforo  Colombo  and Giovanni  Caboto.

Neither sailed  on behalf of Genoa, and Caboto  actually became a Venetian citizen. The beginning  of the end came in 1488 when the Portuguese captain Bartolomeu Dias rounded Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. In 1492, Columbus, in search of another route to India in the opposite  direction,  began a  series  of  voyages for  Spain,  which opened up trans-Atlantic trade carrying new and valuable spices. Then in 1497, Caboto, the Genoese turned Venetian, sailed for England as John Cabot, again looking for a route to India, and told the world about North America and its wealth of codfish. Worst of all, that same year, another Portuguese, Vasco da Gama, sailed around Africa to India and returned to Portugal two years later. Not only were Atlantic ports now needed  for trade with the newly found lands, but the Portuguese had opened  the way from Atlantic ports to the Indian Ocean and the spice producers. Now the Atlantic, and not the Mediterranean, was the most important body of water for trade.

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.

Genoa succumbed  to the new reality, and during Spain’s golden age, the Genoese served as the leading bankers and financiers of that expanding Atlantic power. Because of this, Genoa has endured as a commercial center and is today a leading Mediterranean port, though the Mediterranean is no longer a leading sea.

PART TWO

The Glow of Herring and the Scent of Conquest

At the time when Pope Pius VII had to leave Rome, which had been conquered by revolutionary French, the committee of the Chamber of Commerce in London was considering the herring fishery. One member of the committee observed that, since the Pope had been forced to leave Rome, Italy was probably going to become a Protestant country. “Heaven help us,” cried another member. “What,” responded the first, “would you be upset to see the number of good Protestants increase?” “No,” the other answered, “it isn’t that, but suppose there are no more Catholics, what shall we do with our herring?”

—Alexandre Dumas,

Le grand dictionnaire de cuisine, 1873

CHAPTER SEVEN

Friday’s Salt

BY   THE   SEVENTH century A.D.,  all  of  western  Europe   spoke  Indo-European languages—languages that stemmed from the Bronze Age Asian invasion of Europe—except for the Basques. In their small mountainous land on the Atlantic coast, partly in what was to become Spain and partly in the  future  France, Basque  culture, language, and laws had survived all the great invasions, including those of the Celts and the Romans.

The Basques  were different. One of those differences was that they hunted whales. They were the first commercial whale hunters, ahead of all others by several centuries. The earliest record of commercial whaling is a bill of sale from the year 670 to northern France for forty pots of whale oil from the Basque coastal province of Labourd, which is now in France.

Through the  centuries  of commercial whaling  that would  follow, the oil boiled from whale fat would be the most consistently valuable part of the whale. Whalebone was also profitable, especially the hundreds of teeth, which were a particularly durable form of ivory. But, in the Middle Ages, Basque fortunes were made trading the tons of fat and red meat that could be stripped from each whale.

The medieval Catholic Church forbade the eating of meat on religious days, and, in the seventh century, the number  of these days was dramatically expanded. The Lenten fast, a custom started  in the fourth century, was increased to forty days, and in addition all Fridays, the day of Christ’s crucifixion, were included. In all, about half the days of the year became  “lean” days, and food prohibitions for these days were strictly enforced. Under English law the penalty for eating meat on Friday was hanging. The law remained on the books until the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII broke with the Vatican.

On lean days sex was forbidden, and eating was to be limited to one meal. Red meat was “hot” and therefore banned because  it was associated with sex. However, animals found in water—which included the tails but not the bodies of beavers, sea otters, porpoises, and whales—were deemed cool, and acceptable food for religious days.

For this reason, porpoise is included in most medieval food manuscripts. But the recipes usually call for costly ingredients, indicating  that  porpoise  was  not  food  for  the  poor.

The following English recipe, with its expensive Asian spices, is from a manuscript dated between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though the recipe may be much older.

PURP YN GALENTEYN

Take purpays:  do away the  skyn; cut  hit yn smal  lechys  [slices]  no more than  a fynger,  or  les.  Take  bred  drawen  wyth  red  wyne; put  therto  powder  of  canell [cinnamon], powder of pepyr. Boil hit; seson hit up with powder of gynger, venegre, & salt.

Fresh whale meat was also for the rich. The great delicacy was the tongue.  Salted  tongue  of  any kind  was  appreciated,  but  especially whale tongue. For the poor, there was craspois, also  called craspoix, or grapois. This was strips of the fattier parts of the whale, salt-cured like  bacon and sometimes  called  in  French lard de carême, which translates as “lent blubber,” because  it was one of the principal foods available to the peasantry for lean days on which other red meats were not allowed. Even after a full day of cooking, craspoix was said to be tough and hard. It was eaten with peas, which was the way the rich ate their whale tongue. Nevertheless, Rouen merchants who sold craspoix to the English paid high tariffs at London Bridge, which suggests this salted whale blubber was a luxury product in England. This would not be the  last time  the  food  of French peasants  was sold  as a treat for wealthy Englishmen.

In 1393, an affluent and elderly Parisian, whose name has been lost, published a lengthy volume of instructions to his fifteen-year-old bride on the running of a household. The book, known as Le mèsnagier de Paris, offers this recipe:

Craspoix. This  is  salted  whale  meat. It  should  be cut in slices uncooked and cooked in water like fatback: serve it with peas.

Peas at the time were dried and cooked as beans are today, so that this dish resembled pork and beans.

On lean  days,  when the  peas  are  cooked, you have  to  take onions that have been cooked in a pot for as long as the peas, exactly the same way that on meat days, lard is cooked separately in the  pot  and then peas  and stock  added. In that same way, on a lean day, at the time the peas are put in a pot on the fire, you should put finely chopped onions and in a separate pot cook the peas. When everything is cooked, fry the onions, put half in the peas and half in the stock—and salt. If that day is during Lent get crapoix and use it the same way that lard is used on meat days.—Le mèsnagier de Paris, 1393

BY THE SEVENTH century, the Basques  built stone towers on high points of  land  along  their  coast.  The remains  of  two  still  stand.  When the lookout in the tower spied a whale, its great shiny black back breaking the  surface  while  spouting  vapor,  he would  shout  a series  of coded cries  that  told  whalers  where  and how big  the  whale  was, and how many other whales were nearby. Five oarsmen, a captain, and a harpooner would  silently row out, hoping  to  spear the  giant unaware. The Basques, who have always had a reputation for physical strength, made  their  harpooners  legendary—large  men of  great  power  who could plunge a spear deep into the back of a sleeping giant.

By  the  ninth  century,  when the  Basques   had  a  well-established whaling business, an intruder arrived—the Vikings. Viking is a term—thought to have its root in the old Norse vika, meaning “to go off”—for Scandinavians who left their native land to seek wealth in commerce.

They did  not have a central location like  Genoa or Venice, and their northern  home provided  them  with  little  to  trade.  If  they  had had a source  of salt, they might have traded  salted  meats  like  the  Celts  or salted  fish like  the  Phoenicians. But without salt, meat and fish were too perishable, and all the Vikings had to trade were tools made from walrus tusk and reindeer antler. In search of a trading commodity, they raided  coastal  communities  in  northern  Europe,  kidnapped  people, and sold them into slavery, which is why they are still remembered for their brutality.

But they were ingenious people, superb shipbuilders, intrepid mariners, and savvy traders. For their captured  slaves, they received payment in silver, silks, glassware, and other luxuries that transformed life for the upper classes in Scandinavia. With their fast-sailing ships, they raided  the  coasts  of Britain and France.  Starting  in 845, these raids turned into campaigns involving large groups. Vikings held territory in the vicinity of the Thames and Loire Rivers, which they used as bases  for both raiding and trading at even greater distances. They traded with Russia, Byzantium, and the Middle East. Great European cities, including both London and Paris, paid the Vikings to be left in peace.

The ninth-century Vikings  also  maintained  a base  along  the Adour River on the northern border of Basque provinces. No records exist of the Vikings teaching shipbuilding to the Basques.  But at the time the Vikings built better ships because  their hulls were constructed with overlapping planks. And it is known that about that time, the Basques started building their hulls the same way and soon had a reputation as the best shipbuilders in Europe.

With their sturdy, new, long-distance ships equipped with enormous storage  holds,  the  Basques  were  no longer  limited  to  the  whale’s winter   grounds   in  their   native   Bay  of  Biscay.   They  loaded   their rowboats onto ships and traveled more than 1,000 miles. By 875, only one  generation  after  the   arrival  of  the   Vikings   in  their  land,  the Basques made the 1,500-mile journey to the Viking’s Faroe Islands.

In those  cold,  distant,  northern  waters,  they discovered  something more profitable than whaling: the Atlantic cod. This large bottom feeder preserves  unusually  well  because   its  white  flesh  is  almost  entirely devoid of fat. Fat resists salt and slows the rate at which salt impregnates fish. This is why oily fish, after salting, must be pressed tightly in barrels  to  be preserved, whereas  cod can be simply laid  in salt. Also, fatty fish cannot be exposed to air in curing because  the fat will become rancid. Cod, along with its relatives including haddock and whiting, can be air-dried before salting, which makes for a particularly effective  cure  that would  be difficult with oily fish such as anchovy or herring.

Had the Vikings told the Basques  about cod or perhaps even sold them some? The Vikings knew the cod well from Scandinavian waters. Less  than  a  century  after  arriving  in the  Adour,  a  band of  Vikings settled Iceland and then moved on to Greenland and from there, by the year 1000, to Newfoundland. They caught cod as they went and dried it in the  arctic  air. Realizing  that dried  cod was a tradable  commodity, they soon established drying stations in Iceland to produce the export.

But the Basques  had spent centuries surrounded by the Roman Empire, where salted fish was a common food, which is probably why they thought of salt-curing  whale  meat. Now they started  salting  cod. The market  was enormous. All of the  formerly Roman world ate  salt fish, and the Basques  had a salt fish to sell that, after a day or more of soaking in fresh water, was whiter, leaner, and better, according to many, than the dark, oily, Mediterranean species that had been used before. Being a fatless fish, air-dried and salt-cured, salt cod, stiff as planks of wood, could be stacked on wagons and hauled over roads, even in warm  Mediterranean climates. It  was better than crapoix and equally  affordable,  and being  a  fish,  was  Church-approved  for  holy days.  For  those  who  desired  a  more  extravagant  cuisine,  it   only needed rich ingredients to dress it up.

Guillaume  Tirel,  known as  Taillevent,  was  the  head  chef  for  King Charles V of France, to whom he introduced cabbage.  In the tradition of great  French chefs,  he worked  his  way up from a childhood  in a royal kitchen in Normandy,  assisting  bellows tenders and spit turners rotating enormous roasts, and he hoisted and lowered the chains holding   huge   stockpots.   Included   in   his   menial   jobs   as   a   boy apprentice  was  desalinating  salted  meats,  regarded  as  one of  the basic skills of an accomplished cook. His nickname Taillevent meant “jib,” which is a small, fast, and versatile sail. Four different versions of his   manuscript—scrolls   of   recipes   titled Le viandier—have   been found, all of uncertain dates, but since the working life of Taillevent was from 1330 to 1395, and these were the recipes he used, Le viandier is thought to predate Le mèsnagier de Paris, making it the oldest known French cookbook.

In Le viandier, Taillevent wrote that “Salt cod is eaten with mustard sauce  or  with  melted  fresh  butter  over  it.” Le mèsnagier de Paris borrowed  the  exact same prescription but added what even today is the best advice on preparing salt cod: “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.”

Robert May, a cook for the Royalists in turbulent seventeenth-century England, suggested salt cod be made into a pie.

Being boiled, take it [the salt cod] from its skin and bones, and mince it with some pippins [apples], season it with nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, caraway-seed, currans, minced raisons, rose-water, minced lemon peel, sugar, slic’t [sliced] dates, white wine, verjuice [sour fruit juice, in this case  probably from apples], and butter, fill your  pyes, bake them, and ice them.

—Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook, 1685

Though cod is  found  only  in northern waters,  salt  cod entered  the repertoire of most European cuisine, especially in southern Europe where  fresh cod was not  available.  The Catalans  became  great  salt cod enthusiasts and brought it to southern Italy when they took control of Naples in 1443. The following recipe comes from the earliest known cookbook written in Neapolitan dialect.

BACCALÀ AL TEGAME [PAN-COOKED SALT COD]

Always  select the largest cod and the one with black skin, because  it is  the most salted. Soak it well. Then take a pan, add delicate oil and minced onion, which you will  sauté. When it turns  dark, add a bit of water, raisins, pine nuts, and minced parsley. Combine all these ingredients and just as they begin to boil, add the cod.

When tomatoes  are  in  season,  you can include  them  in  the sauce  described  above,  making  sure  that  you have  heated  it thoroughly.—Ippolito        Cavalcanti        (1787–1860), Cucina casereccia in dialetto Napoletano, Home cooking in Neapolitan dialect

ALL OF THE fishing nations of northern Europe wanted to participate in the  new, rapidly growing,  extremely profitable  salt  cod market.  They had the  cod but  they  needed  salt,  and the  Vikings  may have  been pivotal in solving this problem as well. One of the first Viking bases  in the  Loire  was  the  island  of  Noirmoutier.  One third  of  this  long  thin island, barely detached from the mainland of France at the estuary of the Loire, is a natural tidal swamp, which strong tides periodically flood with a fresh supply of seawater. The Vikings had long been interested in  the  use  of solar  evaporation  in  making  sea  salt.  Traces  of such Viking   operations   in   the   seventh   century   have   been   found   in Normandy. But the northern climate would have made these saltworks unproductive. The climate has too much rainfall and not enough sunlight. It is not known exactly when Noirmoutier, the nearby mainland marshes of Bourgneuf and Guérande, and Ile de Ré, an island about sixty miles to the south, started building systems of artificial ponds, instead  of relying  on single  pond evaporation. As with  sharing  their shipbuilding  skills  with the  Basques,  no record  exists  of the  Vikings teaching  artificial pond techniques, but it is  known that at the  time  of their arrival, production greatly increased, that the ponds were built sometime in the ninth or tenth century, and that the Vikings had seen successive artificial pond systems in southern Spain. Since Guérande is in Celtic Brittany, Breton historians with a nationalist streak reject the Viking  theory,  preferring  to  believe  that  Celts  originated  the  idea, which is also possible. It is more certain that the Vikings were the first to  trade  the  salt of this  area  to  the  Baltic  and other northern nations, establishing one of the most important salt routes of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.

As Europeans began to recognize that the natural solar evaporation of seawater was the most cost-effective way to produce salt, this area on the  southern side  of the  Brittany peninsula, the  Bay of Bourgneuf, became a leading salt center. This bay was the most northerly point in Europe  with  a  climate  suited  to  solar-evaporated  sea  salt.  The bay also had the advantage of being located on the increasingly important Atlantic  coast  and was connected  to  a river  that  could  carry the  salt inland.  Guérande  on the  north  side  of the  mouth  of the  Loire  River, Bourgneuf  on the  southern side  and the  island  of Noirmoutier  facing them, became major sea salt-producing areas.

ONE GROUP OF Vikings remained in Iceland, becoming the Icelanders. A second  group  remained  in  the  Faroe  Islands.  The  main  body of Vikings were given lands in the Seine basin in exchange for protecting Paris. They settled into northern France and within a century were speaking  a  dialect  of French  and became  known as  the  Normans. Soon the Vikings had vanished.

Meanwhile, Basque ships sailed out with their enormous holds full of salt and returned with them stacked high with cod. They dominated the fast-growing  salt cod market, just as they had the  whale  market, and they used their  whale-hunting  techniques  as  a model for cod fishing. They were efficient fishermen, loading huge ships with small rowboats and sailing long distances, launching the rowboats when they reached the cod grounds. This became the standard technique for Europeans to fish cod and was used until the 1950s, when the last few Breton and Portuguese fleets converted to engine power and dragging nets.

Others  besides  the  Basques  caught  cod in the  Middle Ages—the fishermen of the  British Isles, Scandinavia, Holland, Brittany, and the French  Atlantic—but  the  Basques  brought  back  huge  quantities  of salted cod. The Bretons began to suspect that the Basques  had found some   cod   land   across   the   sea.   By  the   early   fifteenth   century, Icelanders saw Basque ships sailing west past their island.

Did  the  Basques  reach North America  before  John Cabot’s  1497 voyage and the age  of exploration? During the fifteenth century, most Atlantic   fishing   communities   believed   that   they   had.  But   without physical  proof,  many historians  are  skeptical,  just  as  they  were  for many years about the stories of Viking travels to North America. Then in 1961, the  remains  of eight Viking-built turf houses dating  from A.D.

1000 were found in Newfoundland in a place called L’Anse aux Meadows. In 1976, the ruins of a Basque  whaling station were discovered  on the  coast  of  Labrador.  But  they  dated  back  only  to 1530. Like  Marco  Polo’s  journey to  China, a pre-Columbian Basque presence in North America seems likely, but it has never been proved.

FISHERMEN  ARE  SECRETIVE about  good fishing  grounds.  The Basques kept their secret, and others may have also. Some evidence suggests that a British cod fishing expedition had gone to North America more than   fifteen   years   before   Cabot.   The   Portuguese   believe   their fishermen also reached North America before Cabot.

Explorers,  on the  other  hand, were  in the  business  of announcing their discoveries. And they said the cod fishing in the New World was beyond anything Europeans had ever seen. Raimondo di Soncino, the duke of Milan’s envoy to London, sent the duke a letter saying that one of  Cabot’s  crew  had talked  of  lowering  baskets  over  the  side  and scooping up codfish.

After   Cabot’s   voyage,   large-scale   fishing   expeditions   to   North America   were   launched   from   Bristol,   St.-Malo   on  the   Brittany peninsula, La Rochelle on the French Atlantic coast, the Spanish port of  La  Coruña  in  Celtic  Galicia,  and  the  Portuguese  fishing  ports.

Added to this were the many Basque towns that had long been whale and cod ports, including Bayonne, Biarritz, Guéthary, St.-Jean-de-Luz, and Hendaye  on the  French  side,  Fuenterrabía,  Zarautz,  Guetaria, Motrico, Ondarroa, and Bermeo on the Spanish side. On board each of  these  hundreds  of  vessels,  ranked  as  a  senior  officer,  was  a “master salter” who made difficult decisions about the right amount of salting and drying and how this was done. Both under- and oversalting could ruin a catch.

In  the  Middle  Ages,  salt  already  had a  wide  variety  of  industrial applications  besides  preserving  food. It  was used to  cure  leather, to clean  chimneys,  for  soldering   pipes,  to   glaze   pottery,  and  as   a medicine  for a wide  variety of complaints  from toothaches,  to  upset stomachs,  to  “heaviness  of mind.”  But  the  explosion  in the  salt  cod industry after Cabot’s voyage enormously increased the need for sea salt, which was believed to be the only salt suitable for curing fish.

For  the  Portuguese,  the  salt  cod  trade  meant  growth  years  for fishing and salt making. Lisbon was built on a large inlet with a small opening. Aviero, farther up on the  marshy shores of the  inlet, was an ideal   salt-making   location.   It    had   been   the   leading   source   of Portuguese salt since the tenth century. But with the growing demand, the saltworks at Setúbal, built in a similar inlet just south of the capital, became Portugal’s leading supplier. Setúbal’s salt earned a reputation throughout Europe for the dryness and whiteness of its large crystals. It was said to be the perfect salt for curing fish or cheese.

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 salt-works, became the  leading  Newfoundland  fishing  port  of  Europe.  Between  Cabot’s 1497 voyage and 1550, records show that of 128 fishing expeditions from Europe  to  Newfoundland,  more  than half left  from La Rochelle, with holds full of salt from Ile de Ré.

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. Though the  Breton ports were on the north coast of Brittany, it was only a short distance to the saltworks of Guérande, Noirmoutier, and Bourgneuf.

While  northerners  had  the  fish  but  could  not  make  the  salt  and southerners had salt but not the cod, the Basques had neither. And yet they managed to get both. By the thirteenth century, they had parleyed their  shipbuilding   skills   into   a  dependable   sea   salt  supply.  They provided the Genoese  with their large, well-built ships, and Genoa, in return, gave them access to the salt-works on the island of Ibiza.

England, with its skilled and ambitious fishing fleet and its powerful navy, lacked sea salt. On the Channel coast, sea salt was produced by washing  salty  sand  and evaporating  the  saltwater  over  a  fire.  This method  was  more  costly  and less  productive  than  that  utilizing  the natural solar evaporation of seawater. “For certain uses such as curing fish English white salt and rock salt are not as good as Bay salt which is   imported   from   France,”   wrote   William   Brownrigg,   a   London physician, in his 1748 book, The Art of Making Common Salt.

By “Bay salt,”  he meant  solar-evaporated  sea  salt.  The Germans called it Baysalz. The reference is to the Bay of Bourgneuf. The coast from Guérande to Il de Ré had become so dominant in salt making that it was synonymous with solar-evaporated sea  salt. There were better salts. Northern salts made from boiling peat and southern salts such as that of Setúbal were far whiter, which meant purer. French bay salt was intermittently described as gray, even black or sometimes green. But to northern Europe, it was large-grained, inexpensive, and nearby. An affluent household used bay for curing but more costly white salt for the table.  Middle-class  homes bought  inexpensive  bay salt,  dissolved  it back  into  brine,  and boiled  the  brine  over  a  fire  until  crystalized  to make a  finer  salt  for  serving. Le mèsnagier de Paris offers  such a recipe for “making white salt.”

THE FEW CELTIC places that escaped  Romanization are strikingly similar stretches of Atlantic coastline. The low country of southern Brittany with its mud flats in low tide and its marshes full of unexpected canals and ponds  is   reminiscent   of  South  Wales.   South  Wales   poet   Dylan Thomas, describing  his  homeland—“  the  water  lidded  land”—could also  have been describing  the  area  of Guérande  in the  center  of a 100,000-acre inland sea with a small opening to the Atlantic. The tides were so powerful that one town, Escoublac, was completely washed to sea  in the fourteenth century. After that the salt producers built a seventeen-mile wall separating the sea  from the marshland. This wall, which prevents the flooding of 4,400 acres of salt ponds, is still maintained   by  the   salt  workers.  Here,  a  salt  worker  is   called   a paludier, literally a swamp worker.

The tidal  area,  called  the traict, has two  canals  leading  to  smaller channels  leading  to  an intricate  system of large  and small saltworks.

The paludier  let  water  into  his  ponds by a  series  of plugs  in  small wooden dams.  The  height  of  the  unplugged  holes  determined  the water  level.  The paludier  held  a  wooden rake  with  a  long  pole  and scraped  up crystals, piling them on the  earthen dikes  at the  edge  of each  pond. The  piles  were  left  to  dry  and  then  hauled  away  by wheelbarrow. It was a demanding craft because  if the clay bottom was disturbed, the salt became black.

In  the  evenings  when a  dry  wind  caused  crystals  to  form  on the surface of the water, the women would use long poles with a board on the  end to  skim  the  surface  and bring  in the  fleur  de sel.  This  was women’s work,  because  the  fleur  de  sel  salt  was  much lighter  and because  it was believed the work required a woman’s delicate touch, though the dainty work included carrying on their heads baskets of the light salt weighing ninety pounds.

The people of Brittany are Celts, speaking a language derived from the language of Vercingetorix. The paludiers spoke this language until the 1920s. The name Guérande comes from the Breton name Gwenn- Rann, meaning “white country.” Other village names include Poull Gwenn, meaning “white port,” and Bourc’h Baz, known in French as Le Bourg de Batz, which means “the place coming into view”—because it was  on the other  side  of the  salt  marsh.  Villages  of curving  streets, lined  with  one- and two-story  stone  houses  with  high-pitched  roofs, grew up on the edges of the marsh.

Salt  makers  carved  ponds out  of the  grassy swamp, where  leggy herons and startlingly white egrets waded. It would be easy to get lost in this marsh of tall amber grass with hidden black mud-bottomed waterways. But like mariners at sea, the paludiers could get a bearing from the distant black stone church steeples, especially the Moorish tip of Saint-Guénolé in Le Bourg de Batz, the church named after the patron saint of paludiers. The 180-foot steeple was added to the fifteenth-century church in the  1600s to  show navigators  the  entrance from the marsh to the Loire.

In 1557, 1,200 salt  ships  from  other  European  ports  came  to  Le Croisic, the rugged port by the opening of the marshy inland sea. Often the number of ships in the harbor far outnumbered the whitewashed stone houses of Le Croisic’s few streets. While La Rochelle was becoming France’s leading cod port, Le Croisic, between the salt that went out and the goods brought in to trade for salt, became the second most  important  French Atlantic  port  after  Bordeaux.  The British,  the Dutch, and the  Danish all bought French bay salt. Even the  Spanish came to  buy bay salt for their fisheries  in northern Iberia  such as La Coruña.

The Irish, starting in the Middle Ages, traded for salt at Le Croisic. They bought salt for herring, salmon, butter, leather curing, and especially beef and pork. The salt was usually shipped to Cork or Waterford. Their salted beef, the meticulously boned and salted forerunner of what today is known as Irish corned beef, was valued in Europe because  it did not spoil. The French shipped it from  Brest and other Breton ports to their new and fabulously profitable sugar colonies of the  Caribbean—cheap, high-protein, durable  slave  food. This  was later replaced with even cheaper New England salt cod. But the Irish corned  beef  still  traveled  far,  in part  because  it  was adopted  by the British navy—competing with salt cod as a provision.

Irish corned beef became  a staple in Pacific islands visited by the British navy, where it is called keg. These islands, especially those of the  Hawaiian  chain,  were  well  suited  for  salt  making.  Hawaiians traditionally made salt for home use by hollowing out a rock to a bowl- like  shape  and leaving  sea  water  to  evaporate  in  it.  They quickly learned to dig evaporation ponds and developed a trade provisioning British,  French,  and later  American  ships  with  salted  food  such as corned  beef,  which  then  became  part  of their  diet  as  well.  Richard Henry Dana, the Harvard graduate who shipped out on the American merchant  fleet  in  the  1830s, in  his  account  of  the  experience, Two Years  Before  the  Mast, which  became   famous  for  exposing  the appalling  conditions  on board  ship,  wrote  of  the  terrible  salt  beef sailors had to eat in the Pacific. They unkindly labeled it “salt junk.”

It  was  the  seventeenth-century  English  who gave  corned  beef  its name—corns being any kind of small bits, in this case salt crystals. But they  did  more  harm  to  the  name than  the  Pacific  island  trade,  by canning it in South America. The Irish continued to make it well, and it has remained a festive dish there with cabbage  for Christmas, Easter, and St. Patrick’s Day, the three leading holidays.

This  1968 recipe  by the  “Woman Editor” of the Irish Times shows the  care  Irish  take  with  corned  beef,  and avoids  confusion  with  the lesser English version by calling it spiced beef, which may be closer to the original name.

The following are the ingredients for spicing a six-pound joint:

3 bay leaves

1 teaspoon cloves

6 blades mace

1 level teaspoon peppercorns

1 clove garlic

1 teaspoon allspice

2 heaped tablespoons brown sugar

2 heaped teaspoons saltpeter

1 pound coarse salt

For cooking the meat you will need:

one six-pound lean boned joint of beef three sliced carrots a half pint Guinness three medium sliced onions a bunch of mixed herbs one teaspoon each ground cloves and ground allspice

Rub all the dry ingredients together, then pound in the bay leaves and garlic. Stand  the  meat in a large  earthenware  or glass  dish and rub the  spicing  mixture  thoroughly all over it. This  should  be done every day for a week, taking  the  spicing  mixture  from the bottom  of  the  dish  and turning  the  meat  twice.  Then wash the meat, and tie it into a convenient shape for cooking.

Sprinkle  over about one teaspoon each of mixed  allspice  and ground cloves, then put it into  a large  saucepan on a bed of the chopped vegetables. Barely cover with warm water, put the lid on and simmer gently for five hours. During the last hour add the Guinness.

It  could  be  eaten  hot  or  cold,  but  at  Christmas  it  is  usually served cold, in slices. If wanted cold, the meat should be removed from the liquid and pressed between two dishes with a weight on top.—Theodora Fitsgibbon, A Taste of Ireland, 1968

FOR THE BRITISH, salt was regarded as of strategic importance because salt cod and corned beef became the rations of the British navy. It was the same with the French. In fact, 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. In 1345, the count of Holland prepared for his campaign against the Frisians by ordering the salting of 7,342 cod caught off the coast. Olaus Magnus, a Swedish bishop, in his 1555 A Description of the Northern Peoples, wrote  that  the  provisions  necessary  to  withstand  a  long  siege  were herring, eels, bream, and cod—all salted.

The  Guérande  region  specialized  in  salted  fish,  including  hake, skate,  mullet,  and eel.  In season,  May and June, young undersized sardines, known for their delicate flavor, were eaten fresh. The rest of the year, larger sardines were layered in the local salt for twelve days, then washed in seawater and put in barrels. The barrels had holes on the bottom, and on the top was a heavy wooden beam hinged to the wall on one side and weighted with a boulder on the other. The juice was squeezed through the bottom, and every few days another layer of sardines  was  added  until  after  two  weeks  the  barrel  could  hold  no more.

Other  fish were  salted,  especially during  Lent,  including  mackerel, eel, and salmon. Here is a recipe for whiting—a smaller relative of cod —and one for eel.

Let it die in the salt where you leave it whole for three days and three  nights.  Then blanch it in  scalding  water,  cut  it in  slices, cook it in water with green onions. If you want to salt it overnight, clean and gut it. Then cut it in slices; salt by rubbing each slice well with coarse salt.—Le mèsnagier de Paris, 1393

Take a salt eel and boil it tender, being flayed and trust round with scuers, boil it tender on a soft fire, then broil it brown,  and serve  it in  a  clean  dish  with  two  or three  great  onions  boil’d whole and tender, and then broil’d brown; serve them on the eel with    oyl    and   mustard    in    saucers.—Robert     May, The Accomplisht Cook, 1685

The incentive of salt cod profits combined with improved artificial pond technology to greatly increase sea  salt production, especially in France,  but  all  along  the  Atlantic  as  well.  And this  increase  in  salt made more  fish available.  Fishermen,  instead  of rushing  to  market with their  small catch before  it  rotted,  could  stay out  for days salting their catch. Expeditions to Newfoundland were out from spring until fall. Salt made it possible to get the rich bounty of northern seas to the poor people of Europe. Salt cod by the bail, along with salted herring by the barrel, are justly credited with having prevented famine in many parts of  Europe.  The salt  intake  of  Europeans,  much of  it in  the  form  of salted  fish,  rose  from forty grams  a day per  person  in the  sixteenth century to seventy grams in the eighteenth  century.

CHAPTER EIGHT

A Nordic Dream

IN   SOME   PARTS of  Sweden  it  was  “a  dream  porridge,”  in  others  a pancake, that was made in silence and heavily salted. The custom was that the girl would eat this salty food and then go to sleep without drinking anything. As she slept, her future husband would come to her in a dream and give her water to quench her thirst.

No data are available on the success  rate of Swedish girls using this system to find a mate. But the Swedish dream of salt is well documented.  The Swedes  had a  wealth  of  herring  but  nothing  with which to salt it.

One of the major commercial uses of salt in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was to preserve herring, second only to salt cod, in the  European lenten diet. Herring  was such a dominant fish in the medieval  market  that  in  twelfth-century  Paris  saltwater  fish  dealers were called harengères, herring sellers.

Herring  is  a  Clupeidae,  a  member  of  the  same  family  of  small, forked-tailed  oily fish with a single  dorsal fin as  sardines. Anchovies are of a different family but of the same Clupeiforme order as sardines and  herring.   Even  in  ancient   times,   Mediterraneans   knew  about herring, though they may not have known  it as a fresh fish, since it is from northern seas. The Greeks called it alexium, from the word als or h a l s , as    in    Hallstatt,   meaning    “salt.”    But   the    people    of   the Mediterranean world never embraced the salted herring the way they did the salted cod, probably because  they had their own clupeiformes.

The fact that herring became  a hugely successful item of trade in the fourteenth  century  is  directly  related  to  the  fact  that Atlantic  nations, herring  producers,  were  gaining  power  and controlling  markets  and commerce  in a way they never had before. Antwerp  and Amsterdam became leading ports of Europe, far exceeding Genoa and Venice in importance. And just as salt cod became  essential to the British and French   navies,   Dutch   ships,   both   for   war   and  commerce,   were provisioned with salt-cured herring.

Herring hide in ocean depths in winter, but in the spring until fall they rise   and  swim,   sometimes   thousands   of   miles,   to   their   coastal spawning  grounds.  This  phenomenon takes  place  from the  Russian and  Scandinavian  Baltic,  across  the  North  Sea,   as  far  south  as northern France, and across the Atlantic from Newfoundland to the Chesapeake  Bay. Jules Michelet, the poetic nineteenth-century historian, wrote in La Mer, “A whole living world has just risen from the depths  to  the  surface,  following  the  call  of  warmth,  desire,  and the light.”

It is a peculiarity of the English language that while most fish swim in schools, herring swim in shoals, a word of the same meaning derived from   the   same   Anglo-Saxon   root.   A  herring   shoal   consists   of thousands of fish and, once located, provides an ample catch. But herring  feed  by gulping  in  seawater  as  they  swim  and filtering  out minuscule zooplankton. They will search thousands of miles for these drifting  beds of food, which means that a spot that had always  been teeming with herring may suddenly one day be devoid of a single one, and they might not return to that spot for years. For the peoples of northern Europe who depended on herring, this could be a cataclysmic event, often blamed on the sins of the village folk. In the Middle Ages, adultery was thought to be a major cause of the herring leaving.

Herring  had been a leading  source  of food  for Scandinavians  and other populations on the Baltic and North Sea  for thousands of years. Archaeologists   have   found   herring   bones   among  5,000-year-old Danish remains. What really happened in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was not so much new ways of salting nor new ways of fishing but an increased supply of salt. This was especially important for herring  because  the  salt  had to  be  readily  available  for  the  fishery. Unlike the fat-free cod, herring must be salted within twenty-four hours of being  lifted  from the  sea.  This  was  an almost  universally  agreed upon and inviolable law of herring curing. In 1424, the count of Holland threatened  to  prosecute  any fishermen who cured  a herring  that had been out of the water for more than twenty-four hours.

There  was  also  an invention  of sorts.  The standard  technique  for preserving fish going back to Phoenician times was to gut it, dry it, and pack it in  layers  with salt. In 1350, Wilhelm  Beuckelzon, a fisherman from Zeeland, the fishing center of south Holland—or  in other accounts Wilhelm Beucks, a fish merchant in Flanders—started a practice of pickling  herring  in brine, fresh with no drying  at all, and therefore  the fish  could  be  cured  without  the  risk  of  its  fat  turning  rancid  from exposure  to  the  air. For centuries, Europe’s  powers, in their bids  for control of the  Lowlands, paid  homage to  Beuckelzon, the  inventor  of barreled  herring. In 1506, Charles  V, the  Holy Roman Emperor, who was raised in Flanders, visited Beuckelzon’s grave to honor his contribution to mankind. But in truth Beuckelzon’s invention ranks with Marco Polo’s discovery of pasta, or even Columbus’s discovery of America, as one of history’s more bogus tales.

At the time of Beuckelzon’s invention, herring already had been barreled  in brine  by the  Scandinavians, the  French, the  Flemish, and the English for centuries. Nevertheless, the myth, like many myths, lived on. In 1856, Czar Alexander  II of  Russia  erected  a monument to  the memory of a fourteenth-century Flemish fisherman named Benkels, who, he said, invented barrel-packed herring and then moved to Finland, thus spreading the idea to Scandinavia. These tributes, even if factually dubious, do speak to the importance northern nations attached to barreled brine-salted herring.

The booming medieval salt fish market was low end—lenten food for poor people. Upper-class people had their fish sped to them fresh, or if  they  lived  too  far  from  the  water,  had their  royal  fish  ponds and holding tanks, or farmed fish such as carp. But from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries an estimated 60 percent of all fish eaten by Europeans was cod, and a significant portion of the remaining 40 percent was herring.

Cured  herring  had an even lower  standing  than salted  cod, and it was hated by many poor people who had nothing else to eat for holy days. The French way of saying that breeding will tell is le caque sent toujours  le  hareng, the  barrel always  smells  of herring. In Brittany, a rock known to romantics as the Tomb of Almanzor, the legendary tomb of a lover who was drowned  at sea,  was laughingly known by Breton workers  as tombeau du hareng saur, the tomb of the pickled herring, because it was where they ate their lunch.

But despite  its  low standing, fortunes  could  be made on furnishing the poor with herring. The herring was plentiful. Access  to salt was the only limitation.

EVAPORATING SEAWATER OVER a fire was slow and costly, but northerners developed techniques to produce salt in gray, rainy climates. In northern Holland and southern Denmark, peat salt was made by burning peat that was impregnated with seawater. This ocean-soaked peat, known in Dutch as zelle, was dug from the tidal flats off the coast. The Dutch sometimes built temporary dikes to seal off an area while zelle was being harvested. It would be loaded on boats and carried to the mainland.

In  the  Middle  Ages,  Zeeland,  the  ocean-pocked  estuary  of  the Schelde River in southern Holland, was a center for peat salt. Porters would  carry  the  sea-logged  peat  to  huts,  where  it  was  dried  and burned. All that would remain would be ashes  and salt. Saltwater was added, and it  would  absorb  the  salt in a brine  and leave  behind  the ashes.  The brine was then evaporated. When badly made, this produced  an impure  product  known as  black  salt.  But  it  could  also produce a very white, fine-grained salt if the peat was not mixed with soil and if an unscrupulous salt maker had not bulked up his crystals by deliberately adding white ashes. Good-quality peat salt from the Lowlands   was   highly  valued   for   herring   but   was   expensive   and produced only in small quantities.

By the mid–thirteenth century, good-quality zelle was becoming hard to find and very valuable, which made peat salt even more expensive. The greedy would pilfer dikes, the earthworks that kept out the sea, for peat. The one sacrosanct law of Dutch society, a nation living at sea level  and below,  is  to  preserve  the  dikes.  Salt  makers  began to  be seen as a threat to this critical first line of national defense, and laws were passed  heavily taxing zelle, then fining anyone who dug peat within the Zeeland dikes, and, in time, repressing the salt industry.

Salt mak ing from Olaus Magnus’s 1555 A Description of the Northern Peoples. Kungliga Biblioteket

Some sea salt was produced on the southern shore of England, but only in unusually dry, sunny summers. On the Danish island of Laesø, in the body of water known as the Kattegat, which lies between Denmark and Sweden, sea salt was produced by evaporating ocean water to a denser  brine  and then boiling  it.  The Finnish,  too,  made salt  by this process, boiling down arctic seawater near the current Russian town of Murmansk. The salt was mostly used for the productive salmon fishery of the area, but some of it was shipped by cart to Finland and Russia. The Norwegians used a similar process. Though this salt was expensive, the demand made it economically feasible. Oslo was actually a salt trading center.

Olaus Magnus described how Norwegians improved upon this arduous sea salt process by pumping saltier water from sea depths by means of piping  made from hollowed  tree  trunks. The same practice was carried  out  in Sweden until the  eighteenth century.  The process destroyed a great deal of forest, the source of fuel and piping, to produce only a small amount of salt.

Sweden hoped to acquire an island in the Caribbean from which to produce salt, but when it finally got one, St.-Barthélemy, the amount of salt produced and shipped back to Sweden was barely enough to cure the quantity of herring destined for the island as slave food.

The shortage  of salt in the  North was frustrating  because  of all the world’s oceans, the cold subarctic seas  have the densest schools and the greatest variety of species. Magnus wrote:

Herring   can  be  purchased   very  cheaply  for   the   supply  is copious. They present themselves in such large numbers off shore  that  they not  only burst  the  fishermen’s  nets,  but,  when they arrive in their shoals, an axe or halberd thrust into their midst  sticks  firmly upright.—Olaus   Magnus, A Description  of the Northern Peoples, 1555 Landing     herring     from     Olaus     Magnus’s     1555 A Description  of  the  Northern  Peoples.  Kungliga Biblioteket

The abundance of herring, combined with their method of extracting food from swallowing seawater and the fact that they appeared to die instantly when taken from the water, led some medieval observers of natural phenomena to  conclude  that herring  was a unique  species of fish whose only nourishment  was the  seawater  itself. Adding  to  their mystique, herring  seem to  let out a cry when they die, a high-pitched hiss, which is probably air escaping the swimming bladder.

The small fish were also noted by maritime people for a phenomenon  known as herring lightning, which occurred because  the shoals were so dense that they reflected light.

In the sea at night its eyes shine like lamps, and, what is more, when these  fish are  moving  rapidly  and the  huge shoal  turns back on itself, they resemble flashes of lightning in the churning water.—Olaus Magnus, A Description of the Northern Peoples, 1555

A NUMBER OF ways were found to preserve herring with small quantities of   salt.    The   Dutch   had   their groene     haringen, green   herring, sometimes called new herring, which was gutted on board ship in early spring   or   late   fall—before   or   after   spawning.   The  herring   were deboned, but the gall bladder had to be left in the fish because  it contains  enzymes that  cure  it.  Then the  fish were  dunked in a  mild brine. They had to be eaten soon, ideally within twenty-four hours, so while green herring required less salt, they had limited trading value.

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. The origin of smoking is unknown. The Romans smoked cheeses  and ate Westphalian ham, which was smoked. It is not known when the first fish was smoked. In the 1960s, a Polish archaeologist found a fish smoking station in the area of Znin, which he dated from between the eighth and tenth centuries. The Celts and Germans did  not lack salt, yet they smoked their hams because cold winters forced food to be enclosed in fire-warmed rooms.

Smoked foods  almost  always  carry with them  legends  about  their having  been created  by accident—usually the  peasant hung the  food too  close  to  the  fire, and then, imagine  his  surprise  the  next morning when . . .

Red  herring,  a  famous   export  from  the   East  Anglia   region  of England along the North Sea, is soaked in a brine of salt and saltpeter and then smoked over oak and turf. The discovery of red herring was described by a native East Anglian, Thomas Nash, in 1567. He claimed that it  came about when a Yarmouth fisherman with an unusually  large  catch  hung the  surplus  herring  on a  rafter,  and  by chance the room had a particularly smoky fire. Imagine his surprise the next day when the white-fleshed fish had turned “red as a lobster.”

Finnan haddie, a haddock soaked in brine  and then smoked over peat and sawdust, was originally called  Findon haddocks because  it was made in the Scottish North Sea  town of Findon, near Aberdeen. It was  not  commercialized  until  the  mid–eighteenth  century,  though  it may have  been  a  household  product  for  a  long  time  before  that. Despite  the  relatively  recent  date,  it  is  commonly  said  that  finnan haddie too was originally made accidentally by fishermen hanging their salt fish too close to the smoky peat fire in their cabin.

By the  sixteenth century, if not earlier, on the  Swedish coast of the Gulf of Bothnia, the body of water between Sweden and Finland, a light cure was devised for Baltic herring, and these pickled fish became known as surströmming.  The Baltic  Sea,  a less  salty body of water than the  North Sea,  has leaner  and smaller  herring  than the Atlantic and North Sea  herring eaten by the British and the Dutch. In Sweden, which has both a North Sea  and a Baltic coast, the fish are known by completely  different  names. A Baltic  herring  is  called  a strömming, and a North Sea  herring is a sill. A number of Baltic languages make this  distinction.  Russians  speak  of  a  Baltic sal aka and an Atlantic sel’d’.

A story persists  in Sweden that  surströmming  was  discovered  by accident by Swedes  trying to save on salt. Surströmming was a basic ration of the  Swedish army  in the  seventeenth century during  the  fifty years of sporadic armed conflict that is known as the Thirty Years War.

It  is  still regulated  by a medieval royal ordinance  and must be made from herring caught in April and May just before spawning. The head and entrails are removed, but the roe is kept in the herring, which is put into light brine in barrels holding 200 pounds of fish. The fish are left to ferment  in  the  barrels  for  ten  to   twelve   weeks  at  a  temperature between   fifty-four    and   sixty-four   degrees   Fahrenheit.   The   third Thursday in August, the  producers  are  allowed  to  put the  fish on the market.

Originally  it  was  taken  from  the  barrel,  but  in modern  times  it  is canned in July. By eating time in September, the can is bulging on the top and bottom and looks ready to explode. As the can is opened, the family stands around it to  get the  first fumes. Nowadays some of the younger members flee the room. The can opener digs in, and a white milky brine fizzes out, bubbling like fermented cider and smelling like a blend of Parmesan cheese  and the bilge water from an ancient fishing vessel.

These potent little fish have always been shrouded in controversy because, like Roman garum, they flirtatiously hover between fermented and rotten. Like garum, through, surströmming is in truth fermented and not  rotten,  because   the  brine  the  fish  is  dipped  in  is  sufficient  to prevent putrification until the fermentation process takes over. If done properly, surströmming has a strong flavor, one revered by aficionados of cured fish and loathed by the less initiated.

To eat surströmming, the bloated, bluish-white, little headless fish is slit in the belly and the roe removed. None but the brave eat the roe. The splayed  fish is mashed hard on the  spine  with a fork and turned over. The bones can then be easily lifted off. The wine-colored fermented flesh inside is then placed on a buttered krisp, a Swedish cracker, with mashed potatoes. Swedes  use a small long yellow fingerling potato with a floury texture—a breed designed to survive the northern winter. In the  north of Sweden, onions  are  added, but in the south this  is  regarded  as  an unnecessary distraction.  Once properly blended with all these tastes and textures, the fish is surprisingly pleasant. The only remaining problem is how to get the smell out of the house, a lingering odor that suggests the question: How could such a thing possibly have been eaten? In recent years a Swedish company tried to export surströmming to the United States, but the U.S. government refused it entry on the grounds that it was rotten.

THE MORE USUAL way of preserving  fish required  a great  deal of salt. Herring salting was described by Simon Smith, an agent for the British government, in 1641. As soon as the herring were taken from the nets, they were passed to “grippers,” who gutted them and mixed them with dry salt crystals and packed them in a barrel. The barrels were then left for a day to  draw out the  herring  juice  and dissolve  most of the  salt. Then more salt was added and the barrel closed. According to Smith, the  brine  had to  be  dense  enough for  the  herring  to  float. A barrel containing 500 to 600 herring would require fifty-five pints of salt.

The salt shortage of the northern fisheries was solved by a commercial   group   that   organized   both   herring   and  salt   trades. Between 1250 and 1350, a grouping of small associations in northern German  cities  formed.  Known as  the  Hanseatic  League,  from  the Middle    High    German    word Hanse,   meaning   “fellowship,”   these associations pooled their resources to form more powerful groups to act  in their  commercial  interests.  They stopped  piracy  in the  Baltic, initiated quality control on traded items, established commercial laws, provided reliable nautical charts, and built lighthouses and other aids to navigation.

Before the Hanseatics gained control of the northern herring trade, peat salt was often laced with ashes, and inferior, even rotten herring was commonly sold. Le mèsnagier de Paris gave this advice: “Good brine  cured  herring  can be recognized  because  it  is  lean but  with a thick back, round and green, whereas the bad ones are fat and yellow or the backs are flat and dry.”

The fine, round-backed ones would be nicely displayed on the top of the barrel, and then only a few layers down lay the flat, dry backs. The Hanseatics guaranteed that an entire barrel was of quality. Those caught placing bad herring in the bottom of a barrel were heavily fined and forced to return the payment they received. The inferior fish were burned and not thrown back into the sea  for fear other fish would eat them and become tainted.

By the fourteenth century, the Hanseatics controlled the mouths of all the  northerly  flowing  rivers  of  central  Europe  from the  Rhine  to  the Vistula. They had organizations in Iceland, in London,  and as far south as the Ukraine and even in Venice. This gave them the ability to buy salt  from  numerous  sources  to  supply  the  northern  countries.  In  the early fourteenth century,  the  Hanseatics,  realizing  the  low prices  and light tax on Portuguese salt more than made up for the cost of transporting it a longer distance, imported Setúbal white salt to trade in the Danish and Dutch fisheries. In the year 1452 alone, 200 Hanseatic ships stopped in Le Croisic to load Guérande salt for the Baltic.

In  the  fourteenth  and fifteenth  centuries,  Fasterbö  and Skanör  in southern Sweden became major herring producers. They imported salt from the  Hanseatic  German port of Lübeck and exported  their cured herring back to Lübeck to be marketed throughout Europe. All of this trade was carried on Hanseatic ships. At the height of their power in the fifteenth century, the Hanseatics were believed to have had at their command 40,000 vessels and 300,000 men.

For a time, the Hanseatics were well appreciated as honorable merchants who ensured quality and fought against unscrupulous practices. They were  known as Easterlings  because  they came from the  east,  and this  is  the  origin of the  word sterling, which  meant  “of assured  value.” The Hanseatics  are  still honored  by a street name— Esterlines  Street—in the  medieval  port  district  of the  Basque  city of San Sebastián.

But in time  they were  seen as  ruthless  aggressors  who wanted  to monopolize all economic activity, and the merchant class rebelled against them. To control herring and salt was to control northern economies. In 1360, the Danes went to war with the Hanseatics over control of herring and lost. By 1403, when the Hanseatic League gained  complete  control  of  Bergen,  Norway,  it had  achieved  a monopoly on northern European production of herring and salt but not without constant warfare with rebellious Baltic states. In 1406, the Hanseatics caught ninety-six British fishermen off Bergen, tied their hands and feet, and threw them overboard.

Baltic  herring  started  to  vanish—perhaps  too  much adultery  was being   committed   in   Baltic   villages—and   the   North   Sea   catches became  larger than ever. Suddenly the  strömming  had vanished  and the  sill  abounded. This  strengthened  the  English  and the  Dutch  and weakened the Hanseatic League. Slowly the British and Dutch gained enough economic and military might to overwhelm the cartel. This was especially true after colonization gave them North American fisheries.

But once the Hanseatic League began to fade, the Dutch and British were still in competition. Their herring fisheries, which became the European leaders, faced each other across the North Sea  in Brielle on the Dutch side and Yarmouth on the English side.

The seasonal arrival of the  herring  shoals became  essential to  the economies  of both England  and Holland.  In medieval England, every spring, lookouts were posted along the important seaward points of eastern Britain to  spot  the  arrival  of the  herring.  The lookouts  would point  with  a  stick  to  indicate  the  direction  the  shoal  was  swimming from the first point off Crane Head in the Shetlands in early June until they reached Yarmouth in September. In Yarmouth, as early as the fourteenth  century,  the  annual  fair  marking  the  end  of  the  herring season, held from September 29 until November 10, attracted herring merchants from the rest of Europe.

Like the Venetian salt fleet, the huge Dutch herring fleet was trained as an armed naval force that fought numerous wars in Europe and the Caribbean against the  British professional navy. Finally, in 1652, the British navy destroyed the Dutch herring fleet. In time, the Dutch made peace  with the British. England got a Dutch king. But this still left the French, who had their own herring fleets and every intention of controlling salt and being a world power.

CHAPTER NINE

A Well-Salted Hexagon

IN   A  1961 speech,  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.” The reason for the  variety is that, given its limited area, the amalgamation that became France had a  remarkable  diversity  of  climates,  topography,  and  cultures.  The nation was slowly constructed from feudal kingdoms. It  included Burgundians and Provençals, Germanic-speaking Alsatians, Celtic- speaking  Bretons,  Basques,   and  Catalans.  The  Hexagon,  as  the French would  come to  call it, bordered  the  Lowlands, the  Rhine, the Alps,  the  Mediterranean,  the  Pyrenees,  the Atlantic,  and the  English Channel, which the French have never called English but simply La Manche, the  sleeve, a word that refers to  its  long  and narrow shape. The Hexagon offered a wealth of salt: rock salt, brine springs, and both Mediterranean and Atlantic sea salt.

The royal tables  of the  diverse  medieval and Renaissance  French kingdoms were set with huge, ornate nefs, ships, in this case  jeweled vessels  holding  salt. A nef was both a saltcellar and a symbol of the “ship of state.” Salt symbolized both health and preservation. Its message  was that the ruler’s health was the stability of the nation.

In 1378, Charles V of France hosted a famous dinner that posed the awkward question of where to place the nef. Should it be in front of him or by his  guest  Charles  IV, the  Prague-born Holy Roman Emperor? And what about the  emperor’s  son who was also  joining them, King Wenceslaus   of  Germany,   who  would   become   emperor   after   his father’s death later that same year? It was decided that the table had to be set with three large nefs, one for each of the three monarchs.

Richard II, the fourteenth-century British monarch whose unpopularity was  attributed  to  both  his  gaudy  extravagance  and  his  lackluster pursuit of the Hundred Years War with France, had a nef on his table with  figures  of eight  tiny men on the  ship  deck hoisting  the  flags  of France. The unusual nef had no shortage  of admirers, since  Richard employed 2,000 chefs and was said to have entertained 10,000 visitors daily, most of whom stayed for dinner.

In the fifteenth century, Jean, duc de Berry, featured on his banquet table  a  gold  ship  that  held  not  only  salt  but  pepper,  as  well  as, according to some accounts, powdered unicorn horn. Since it is doubtful that anyone has ever  seen a unicorn, the  powder  may have been from the tusk of a narwhal, a single-horned relative of the whale. Unicorn horn was believed to be a poison antidote, which many monarchs wanted to have close-by at mealtime. Some nefs contained “serpent’s tongue,” which was actually shark’s tooth, for the same purpose. The compartments in nefs were frequently locked.

Elaborate saltcellars in all forms, not only ships, were popular. In addition to his nef, in 1415 the duc de Berry, a notable patron of the arts, received from the artist Paul de Limbourg an agate saltcellar with gold lid and a sapphire knob with four pearls.

In the sixteenth century, when things Italian were especially fashionable, Benvenuto Cellini, the Florentine high-Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith, made a saltcellar for King François I of France, perennial war maker and insatiable art enthusiast. The dish of salt was held between the figure of Neptune, god of the sea, and the earth goddess—salt between its two sources, sea  and earth. By Neptune’s knee was a temple with a tiny drawer for pepper.

In addition to  an elaborate  saltcellar, referred  to  as the  Great Salt, lesser saltcellars would be removed from the table and others brought out with changing courses. The Great Salt stayed by the master or host or most honored guest throughout the meal.

It was considered rude, sometimes even unlucky, to touch salt with the fingers. Salt was taken from the cellar on the tip of a knife and a small pile  put on the  diner’s plate. Some medieval and Renaissance plates had a small depression for salt.

Placing salt on the table was a rich man’s luxury, but all classes ate salted  foods.  In  1268, the Livre  des   métiers, the  Book of  Trades, which listed the rules of the cooking profession, said that cooked meat could  be  kept  for  only  three   days  unless  it   had  been  salted. Le mèsnagier  de  Paris gave  recipes  for not only salted  whale, but also beef, mutton, venison, coot (an aquatic bird), goose, hare, and a great number of pork products. Although salting was often done in the home, it   was  usually  not  women’s  work.  The  medieval  French,  like   the Chinese, believed that the presence of women  could be destructive to fermentation.  In  France,  a  menstruating   woman is   said   to   be en salaison, curing in salt. It was dangerous to have a woman  in a room full of  fermenting  food  when she  herself  was  in  fermentation.  “It  will spoil the lard,” people would say.

Originally, salting was a way to keep food through the winter, but by the Middle Ages such foods were eaten year-round.

In June and July pieces  of salted  beef  and mutton should  be well  cooked in water  with green onions  after  having  rested  in salt from morning to evening or for a day or more.—Le Mèsnagier de Paris, 1393

A food that typifies the French love of salted foods is the choucroute of Alsace and Lorraine. Alsace, known as Elsass in German, was part of the Holy Roman Empire, and France did not add it to its  Hexagon until 1697. The Alsatian language is a dialect of German. Choucroute appears to have evolved from German sauerkraut. But the French, having a resistance to acknowledging German origins in their culture, argue that the Chinese salted cabbage,  and the Tartars made it, and, always the favorite French source for foreign food, Catherine de Médicis might have introduced it. Catherine was a sixteenth-century Florentine who married the future Henri II of France and moved to his country with many Italian food ideas.

In a popular French legend, superstar Sarah Bernhardt went to a Chinese   restaurant  in  Paris   and  ordered   choucroute.  The  waiter fetched  the  maître  d’, who with a suggestion of indignation informed the actress, “This is a Chinese restaurant, Madame.”

“Mais oui, Monsieur,” the actress supposedly replied. “Choucroute is a Chinese invention.”

The  Chinese   may  not   have  invented   it.   Scientists   have  found evidence  of early hunters  curing  a leaf that resembled  cabbage.  But the Chinese have been pickling vegetables for millennia, and cabbage was one of the first vegetables used.

The Romans made sauerkraut and were great cabbage enthusiasts. Cato  suggested  that  women would  live  long,  healthy  lives  if   they washed their genitals in the urine of a cabbage  eater. He was listened to  on health  matters,  since  in  an age  of short  lives  and high  infant mortality  he  lived  to  be  over  eighty  and claimed  to  have  fathered twenty-eight sons, all of which he credited to eating cabbage  with salt and vinegar.

On the other side, Platina, from fifteenth-century Cremona, had warned against it:

It  is agreed  that cabbage  is of a warm and dry nature  and for this reason increases black bile, generates bad dreams, is not very nourishing,  harms  the  stomach a little  and the  head and eyes very much, on account of its gas, and dims the vision.

The Alsatian word  for choucroute, surkrut,  resembles  the  German, sauerkraut.  Both  words  have  the  same  meaning:  sour  or  pickled grass. The German princess Palatine, sister-in-law to Louis XIV, claimed  to  have  introduced  the  dish  to  the  court  at  Versailles.  She wrote back to her sister in Germany, “I have also made Westphalian- type  raw hams fashionable  here.  Everyone  eats  them  now, and they also eat many of our German foods—sauerkraut, and sugared cabbage,  as well as cabbage  with fat bacon, but it is hard to get it of good quality.” She sent to Germany for cabbage  seeds  but still complained that the vegetable did not grow well in sandy French soil.

The closest to German soil would be the west bank of the Rhine— Alsace. The word Alsace, with the root als, may have originally meant “land of salt.” The rock salt of Alsace does not have a high concentration of sodium chloride but has a considerable concentration of  potassium  chloride,  known as  potash,  and in modern  times  the Alsatian  habit  of  mining  the  potash  for  fertilizer  and  dumping  the sodium  chloride  in  the  Rhine  has  become  a  major  environmental issue.

Until 1766, Lorraine  was the  independent  kingdom  of Lotharingia, named  after   the   ninth-century   king   Lothair.   Long  before   France acquired it, Lorraine was already famous for the richness of its brine springs, which have denser brine  than in most of Germany and have been exploited since prehistoric times. In the Seille Valley of Lorraine, salt has been produced since the time of the Celts. The Seille, whose name means “salty,” is a tributary of the Moselle. The Celtic salt mine had been abandoned, but in the tenth century, Lotharingians began boiling brine with wood fires. Salt could be moved along the Moselle to Alsace,  Germany,  and  Switzerland.  Choucroute,  surkrut,  and sauerkraut were all made with Lorraine salt.

Surkrut was a dish for special occasions—weddings and state banquets. By the sixteenth century, a trade existed in Alsace known as a surkrutschneider. Literally sauerkraut tailors, surkrutschneiders chopped  cabbage   and  salted  it  in  barrels  with  anise  seeds,   bay leaves, elderberries, fennel, horseradish, savory, cloves, cumin, and other  herbs  and spices.  Each  surkrutschneider  had his  own secret recipe.

By the  early eighteenth century, the  French had their own word for surkrut: sorcrotes.   In  1767,  encyclopedist   and  philosopher   Denis Diderot mentioned saucroute in a letter, and finally, in 1786, on the eve of the French Revolution, the word choucroute first appeared. By then, choucroute  was generally served  mixed  with or as a bed underneath other   salted   foods,   and  the   dish   was   called choucroute   garnie. Originally it  was served with salted fish, especially herring. But gradually salted fish was replaced by salted meats—an assortment of sausages and cured  cuts  of pork piled  festively on a large  platter  of seasoned, salt-cured cabbage.

Like wine, salt, and salted meats, choucroute was an important international trading commodity for Alsace.

Sauerkraut made its  notable  debut off the  continent in 1753, when an English doctor informed the admiralty that it prevented scurvy. Many medieval Europeans had heeded Cato’s words on the health benefit of cabbage,  fashioning  plasters  and cough medicines  from the  leaves. The healing of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II by application of cabbage plasters in 1569 was widely publicized.

Once  again,   cabbage   was  medicine.   The  British  navy  set   up “sauerkraut stores” in British ports so that all Royal Navy vessels could set  sail  provisioned  with  sauerkraut.  Captain  James  Cook  had  it served to his crew with every meal. At the same time, across the channel in Paris, it  remained  banquet food  for the  royal court. Marie Antoinette, whose father was from the house of Lorraine, championed choucroute  at  court.  This  classic  early-twentieth-century  recipe  was little changed from that time.

You can buy choucroute  ready-made  at  the  Charcuterie  or at  a prepared-food shop; but in the countryside this is difficult to find; we are giving the recipe in the simplest way possible.

Take a round, well-shaped white cabbage,  clean it, pulling off the green or wilted leaves, split the cabbage  in quarters and remove the thick sides that form the heart.

Then cut the cabbage in slices thick as a straw and prepare the following brine:

Take a small barrel that once contained white wine, clean it thoroughly and cover the bottom with a layer of coarse salt; then put on top of this a layer of cabbage  cut into little strips; sprinkle with juniper berries and here and there peppercorns, press the  layer  in well  but without letting  it break up; add a new layer  of salt, a bed of cabbage, juniper berries and pepper and continue taking care to press well.

It takes about two pounds of salt for a dozen cabbages. The barrel should be only three quarters filled, cover the choucroute with a piece of loosely-woven linen, then a wooden lid that fits completely inside the barrel. Put a 30 kilo [66 pound] weight on the lid. (If you don’t have a weight use a rock or a paving stone.) Once fermentation begins, which happens after a short while, the lid drops down and becomes covered with water formed by the salt. You remove this water but take care to leave a little on the lid.

You can use the choucroute at the end of a month, but once you take some, you have to take care to wash the cloth and the lid and replace them, adding a little fresh water on the top to replace what has been taken.

The fermentation  gives  the  choucroute  a  bad  smell,  but  don’t  worry about  it, because you wash the choucroute with a little water before serving and the bad taste vanishes.

Choucroute  garnie: Wash the choucroute, changing the water several times, and squeeze  it  well  in your  hands; when it  is  drained  so that no more water  is  in it, prepare a casserole, placing a piece of lard in the bottom (the fat side should touch the dish). Place on it a bed of choucroute not too tightly packed, salt, pepper, juniper berries, a bit of fat from a roast, a small slice of lard maigre [a baconlike cut of pork from  the  chest],  a  small  sausage, and  half  a  raw cervelas [a  stumpy  all-pork sausage, usually seasoned with garlic. The name comes from pork brains, cervelle, which are rarely included anymore]. Put in another layer of choucroute, salt, pepper, juniper berries, roast fat, lard maigre, sausage, cervelas, and continue in this  way until there is no more choucroute. Moisten the entire thing with a bottle of white wine and two glasses of stock. Cover and let cook for five hours over a low heat.

Finally,  remove  the  fat  from  the  top  and press  hard on the  choucroute  with  a spoon, then place a platter over the casserole and turn it upside down so that your choucroute comes out shaped like a pâté.

For two or three people, you can use two pounds of choucroute. It  is  better  reheated  the  next  day.— Tante   Marie, La  veritable cuisine de famille (Real family cooking), 1926

IN THE TIME of Pliny, a Roman legionnaire named Peccaius established a sea-salt pond in the estuary of the Rhône to raise money to pay the salaries  of the  enormous  Roman army fighting  in Gaul.  The marshy area, including the swamp known as the Camargue, was well suited to salt making. Located both on the Mediterranean and on a river that led into Gaul and later France, the Italians recognize the Rhône estuary as an ideal location for their salt making. A short distance from where the Genoese  had their saline in Hyères, other Italians, especially the Tuscans, invested in saltworks in the estuary of the Rhône.

In the thirteenth century, a group of religious extremists based in the town of Albi and known as the Albigensians inspired Pope Innocent III to  launch  a  series  of  crusades  to  cleanse  the  region  of  “heretics.” Asked how to recognize a heretic from a true believer, one crusader, according  to  legend,  said,  “Kill  them  all.  God knows his  own.” The chaos  that  ensued  from this  approach  is  known as  the  Albigensian Wars. In 1229, Louis IX, the fifteen-year-old king of France, concluded a treaty to end the French campaign against the Albigensians, in which the Rhône estuary was ceded to the French Crown.

This gave France its Mediterranean coast, and in 1246 Louis established  the  first French Mediterranean port, a walled  city named Aigues-Mortes,  which means “dead waters.”  These  dead waters  lay beyond  the   massive   ramparts   that  enveloped   the   city,  in  a  vast expanse of salt evaporation ponds built out into the Mediterranean. Louis wanted salt revenue to finance his dream of leading a Crusade to the Middle East, which he did two years later. He captured an Egyptian port before  being  defeated  and taken prisoner. For this  he has been ever after known in French history as Saint Louis. When he finally returned to France in 1254, his saltworks, milky ponds where tall pink flamingos waded, were still producing salt and state revenue.

In  1290, the  Crown  bought  nearby  Peccais,  site  of  the  Roman works, and the two became the third largest producer of salt in the Mediterranean Sea,  after Ibiza  and Cyprus. This idea  of Saint Louis, for Mediterranean saltworks  to  be controlled  for royal revenue, would one day grow into what would be remembered as one of the greatest disasters of French royal administration.

THE MEDITERRANEAN SALTWORKS shipped their product up the Rhône as far as Lyon. The salt was also carried on land routes over the mountains of Provence to nearer destinations such as Roquefort-sur- Soulzon.

It is the presence of salt throughout France, along with either cows, goats, or sheep, that has made it the notoriously ungovernable land of 265 kinds of cheese.  French cheese  makers were trying to be neither difficult nor original. They were all trying to preserve milk in salt so they could have a way of keeping it as a food supply. But with different traditions and climates, the salted curds came out 265 different ways. At one time there were probably far more variations than that.

The cheese  made in the Aveyron, a mountainous area of dramatic rock outcropping and thin topsoil, is as old as its famous salt source. Pliny  praised  a  cheese   from  these  mountains  above  the Mediterranean coast that was probably a forerunner of the now famous Roquefort. According to a widely believed, though not well- documented, legend, Charlemagne passed  through the area after his disastrous Spanish campaign of 778. The monks of the nearby monastery of St.-Gall served  the  emperor  Roquefort cheese,  and he immediately busied himself cutting out the moldy blue parts, which he found disgusting. The monks convinced him that the blue was the best part  of the  cheese—an effort  for which they were  rewarded  with the costly task of providing  him with two  wheels of Roquefort a year until his death in 814.

The ancient cheese  was and still is produced from milk of the sheep that  graze  on the  rugged  slopes  of a  hidden  mountain  area  named after  its  largest  town,  the  village  of St.-Affrique. Although St.-Affrique has a humid climate, its soil cannot produce crops because the porous limestone rock absorbs most of the moisture.

The farmers would collect the milk, curdle it with rennet, then scoop the  curds  by hand into  molds.  A powder  made  from  grating  moldy bread was sprinkled into the curds. At least since the seventeenth century, the mold came from a huge round bread, half wheat and half rye. Probably other breads were used earlier. The bread was stored in the  same  damp caves  that  aged  the  cheese,  and in a few  weeks it turned  blue  and was ground to  dust for cheese  making. The crumbs fermented in the cheese,  creating bubbles, which after weeks also started to turn blue.

In 1411, the French Crown granted a patent declaring that only the cheese  of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon could be called Roquefort cheese. Roquefort-sur-Soulzon was a tiny village with a few families, located by a rock mass called the Combalou Plateau. In the caves  that run under the village, heat and humidity from underground  springs are trapped in the rocks. But air constantly circulates from faults in the rock, creating air shaft-like tunnels called fleurines. The cheese  cellars were built 100 feet into the rock in natural caves  moistened by the springs and aired by the fleurines.

The environment of the  cellar is  cool, extremely humid, and moldy. The temperature  is  constant, about forty-five  degrees  Fahrenheit day and night all year. The rock walls, the old hand-hewn wooden beams, the wooden shelving where the cheeses  are aged—all are continually slippery wet from the moisture. The rocks offer a kaleidoscope of mold and lichen patterns, and it has been discovered in modern  times that this growth is essential to developing the flavor of the cheese.

Again, there is the legend of a founding accident: An absentminded shepherd boy left his lunch of cheese  curd and rye bread in a cave and weeks later discovered Roquefort cheese.  Even if the legend is apocryphal, it offers a fair description of how the cheese  is made. But for the  cheese  to  be of commercial  value,  it  needs  to  last  for some time. The salt of Aigues-Mortes is rubbed on the top of the cheeses  at the outset of aging. Twenty-four hours later, the cheese  is turned and the  process  repeated.  The  salt  melts  and begins  to  work  into  the cheese.  Like  the  cheese  of Parma, Roquefort becomes  overly salty, and this unfairly gives the cheese  a reputation for saltiness. Alexandre- Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, the eighteenth-century Frenchman said to be the first food journalist, claimed that cheese  was a   salty snack  for  drinking.  “For  those  who need  to  provoke  thirst Roquefort cheese  deserves more than any other the epithet of the drunkard’s biscuit.”

THE BASQUES  LEARNED how to  make hams in their  long  war  with  the Celts  and then  learned  to  market  them  in their  long  peace  with  the ham-loving  Romans. Jambon de Bayonne,  Bayonne ham, was never made in Bayonne but was shipped from the Basque  port of Bayonne at the mouth of the Adour River. It has never been clear, however, if the ham is Basque, though the Basques surprise no one by insisting that it is. Modern France has defined the famous jambon de Bayonne, which was first written about in the  sixth century, as a product made in the watershed  of the Adour, an area  including  all of French Basque-land and bits of the neighboring regions of Landes, Béarn, and Bigorre.

One thing is clear. The salt with which it is made is not Basque. It is from Béarn, from a village a few miles from Basque country called Salies-de-Béarn,  Béarn  saltworks. According  to  medieval  legend,  a hunter wounded a wild boar and chased it into the marsh. By the time he found the animal lying in water, it was already preserved in salt. The brine  springs  of  Lüneburg  near  Hamburg  have  an almost  identical legend,  and  an  ancient  ham,  supposedly  made  from  the  porcine discoverer, is on display in the Lüneburg town hall.

Throughout the watershed of the Adour, shards of pots used in salt making have been found, and some have been dated as early as 1500 B.C. Broken Roman pots  have been found  within walking  distance  of Salies-de-Béarn.

Whether or not a wounded boar ever fell in that spot in the center of Salies-de Béarn, the village has since salted millions of pigs. The town grew up around the mouth of a natural brine spring where a large basin was built to catch the escaping brine. The basin was edged in steps to facilitate approaching it with buckets. The earliest mention of this pool is  in  the  twelfth  century,  and every  narrow, winding  street  in  Salies leads to it.

A town official would test the brine concentration by placing an egg in the pool. When the egg floated, salt making could begin. One or two distributions  were  possible  each week. Some  would  go to  the  brine basin  themselves  with  a  bucket  in  hand, but  most  families  hired tiradous to  gather  the  brine.  The large  wooden buckets  they  used, sameaux, were  an official unit  of  measure,  each  holding  ninety-two liters (twenty-four gallons) of saltwater. In every distribution, each house was entitled to twenty-six sameaux.

At the toll of the bell, the tiradous would run down the steps into the brine,  which they scooped  into  their  sameaux, and run back to  their houses with this weighty, twenty-four-gallon load. They each repeated this   twenty-six  times,  as  quickly  as  possible   because   they  were competing  with  the  other  families,  and the  most  concentrated  brine from  the  bottom  of the  basin  would  be  scooped  up by the  swiftest tiradous.  Weaker   brine   took   longer   to   evaporate,  required   more firewood, and so was less profitable.

In front of each house was a stone well into which the tiradous would quickly but carefully pour the brine and then run back for more. A canal of  hollowed  oak  trunks  ran under  the  house  to  the  basement  salt- making shop where the brine would be boiled.

The families eligible to participate in this community resource were called part-prenants. A part-prenant had to be a descendant of one of the original families, though no one knows exactly when these families originated  or  how many there  were.  A code  was  first written  in  the Béarnaise  language  on November  11, 1587, when the  tradition was already many centuries  old.  This  code defined  the  group  and stated that descendants had part-prenant rights only if they resided within the ramparts of town. If a woman married “a foreigner”—someone from out of town—her children would  only be entitled  to  a half portion, thirteen sameaux, and their future descendants would receive nothing. But a man could marry an out-of-towner, and he and his heirs would receive full portions. In the fourteenth century, there were 200 part-prenant families, but by the time of the French Revolution, Salies-de-Béarn had

800 part-prenant families.

ON   THE   MEDITERRANEAN coast,   west   of  Aigues-Mortes,   in  Catalan country near the  Spanish border, was the  fishing  village  of Collioure. The people  of  Collioure  lived  on selling  wine  and salted  fish.  They fished  anchovies  from  May to  October  on small  wooden boats  that could  sail over the  rocks  of the  shallow harbor, powered  by a lateen sail, a triangle  of canvas gracefully draped  from the  mast on a cross spar   at   a   sixty-degree   angle.   The   design   dated   back   to   the Phoenicians,  but  in Collioure  they called  their  fishing  boats catalans and painted them in brilliant primary colors.

In October, as the  anchovy season ended, the  wine  harvest began on the terraced hills above the town. The wine, called Banyuls, has a dark spicy sweetness  that  is  a perfect  counterbalance  to  the  salted anchovies. The people of Collioure worked their patch of vineyard, cutting back the vines, preparing for the next year until the leaves and the shoots came, and then it was May, time to let the grapes grow and fish anchovies. Each family had a catalan for fishing and a patch on the hill for growing grapes. The men went to sea, and the women mended the nets and sold the catch in town.

Most of the catch was put up in salt. Originally, the anchovy salters used local sea salt from Laplame, one of several sea salt operations in the natural ponds along the Catalan coast. But in time the saltworks at the mouth of the Rhône dominated.

In  the  fourteenth  century,  an epidemic  of  bubonic  plague,  whose delirious victims die within days in excruciating pain, swept through the continent, killing 75 million people—as much as half the population of Europe, according to some estimates. But the fishing village of Collioure  was not  touched,  and it  was widely believed  that  the  town was immune because  of the presence of huge stockpiles of salt for the anchovies.

Since the time of ancient Greece, anchovies have been the most praised  salted  fish in the  Mediterranean, and since  the  Middle Ages those of Collioure have been regarded as the best salted anchovies in the  world. They are  smaller,  leaner,  more  flavorful than  their Atlantic cousins. In the Middle Ages, Collioure was also famous for its salted tuna and sardines. The salters were men because  their strength was needed to heft the salt. Anchovy filleting was done by women because it  required  small  fingers  to  rip  the  tiny  fillets  off  the  bones. Freshly caught anchovies were mixed in sea  salt and kept for a month. Then the heads were removed and the fish cleaned with no tool other than the swift nimble fingers of the women, who then carefully arranged the fish in barrels with alternating layers of fish and salt. There they remained  with  a  heavy weight  on top  for  about  three  months.  The length of time depended on the size of the fish and the weather, especially the temperature. When the anchovies were ripe, the color of the meat around the bones was a deep pink, almost wine colored, and the brine, produced by the salt melting in the juice it extracted from the fish, turned pink. Unscrupulous anchovy makers dyed their brine pink.

ANCHOVIES: These delicate fish are preserved in barrels with bay salt, and no other of the finny tribe has so fine a flavor. Choose those which look red and mellow, and the bones must be oily. They should be high flavored, and have a fine smell; but beware of their  being  mixed  with red  paint  to  improve  their  color  and appearance.—Mary     Eaton, The   Cook   and  Housekeepers Complete and Universal Dictionary, Bungay, England, 1822 The  French  Crown  attached  such importance  to  the  commercial potential  of Collioure  salted fish that the town was exempted  from any salt tax. This greatly aided  the local anchovy business,  but it was the sort  of  arbitrary  exception that  was  to make  the  French  salt  tax  a political  disaster.

CHAPTER TEN

The Hapsburg Pickle

IN  GERMANY,  THE Romans had found  a land  of ancient  salt  mines. Tacitus wrote in the first century A.D. that the Germanic tribes believed the gods listened more attentively to prayers if they were uttered in a salt mine. But many of those mines had been destroyed or closed down in the warfare that followed the disintegration of Rome. As in France, the medieval Church reopened them. Monasteries were often located on the sites of ancient mines so that the salt could provide revenue.

Under the direction of the Church, salt mining boomed in the Middle Ages in  the  Alpine  area  from  Bavaria  into  Austria.  In  Bavaria, Berchtesgaden and adjacent Reichenhall; across the Austrian border, Hallein,  Hallstatt,  Ischl,  and Aussee  were  all  mining  the  same underground bed of salt.  The Austrian  part became known as the Salzkammergut, the salt mother lode, a region of salt mines below green, pine-covered mountains and deep blue lakes. In the winter, the steep pine forests were completely white with snow, but underground the temperature in the mines remained moderate.

Underground springs provided brine that could be boiled  into salt crystals. Plentiful forests offered cheap energy. Reichenhall, which was still in operation in Roman  times, was  destroyed in the  fifth century either by Attila the Hun or possibly by the local supporters of Odoacer, Rome’s  final  conqueror,  the  Germanic-Italian  who in  476  officially ended the Western Roman Empire. A century later, according to some accounts, the saltworks was reconstructed. According to others, it was rebuilt 300 years later by the archbishop of  Salzburg.

Next to Reichenhall was a mountain of salt. On the Bavarian side was Berchtesgaden, and across the border, on the opposite side of the  same steep  wooded mountain  known  as  Dürnberg,  was the ancient Celtic salt mining site of Hallein.

A medieval conflict between the archbishops of Salzburg and the Bavarians  over  control  of  the  salt  mines  continued   for  centuries because Dürnberg mountain contained a Salzburger mine entered on the Hallein side and a Bavarian mine entered from Berchtesgaden.

Underground, the two mines were supposedly separated by less than a half mile, but the shafts from Hallein wandered under the border and so Salzburger miners theoretically took Bavarian salt.

The first archbishop of Salzburg had resurrected the ancient Celtic mine in the late eighth century and with this salt revenue had built thecity of Salzburg, which did not merge with Austria  until 1816. Though Salzburg’s territory had gold, copper, and silver, it was salt for which Salzburg  repeatedly fought. The wealth from salt gave Salzburg  its independence.

In the seventeenth century, an archbishop named Wolf Dietrich tried to dominate the salt market by dramatically lowering the selling price for salt from  his mines, especially Dürnberg. For a time Dietrich made tremendous profits, some of which were used to build grand baroque buildings   in  Salzburg.  Bavaria  retaliated  by banning  trade  with Salzburg,  and this  eventually  led  to  a “salt  war,”  a conflict  which Dietrich lost. This defeat was disastrous for Dürnberg and its village of Hallein because, for a time,  they were  excluded  from much  of the regional salt trade. It was even more disastrous for Archbishop  Wolf Dietrich, who was removed from his Church post and, after five years in prison, died in 1617.

The relationship between the two sides of Dürnberg mountain was not resolved until after Salzburg became a part of Austria, when, in 1829, a treaty between Bavaria and Austria allowed Austrians to mine salt up to one kilometer beyond their border. In exchange, 40 percent of mine workers had to be Bavarian, and Bavaria could fuel its panswith trees chopped on the Austrian side. Though fuel had been plentiful in the  Middle Ages, after centuries  of mining, procuring  wood had become  an important issue.

IN 1268 AND possibly earlier, a new technique was used to mine rock salt.  Instead  of miners  carrying chunks  of rock out steep  shafts  in  baskets  slung  on their backs, and then crushing  the rock into salt, water was piped  into a dug-out vein of rock salt. The water quickly became a dense brine, which was then piped out of the mountain to the village of Hallein, where it was boiled down into crystals over wood-burning fires.

Eventually, the idea became a more sophisticated system known in the Salzkammergut as sinkwerken. A sinkwerk was an underground work area in which the surrounding salt and clay were mixed with water in large wooden tanks. The solution then moved down wooden pipes to iron boiling pans.

Hallein is a village pressed between its two sources of wealth, the rough, rock-faceted  Dürnberg  Mountain and the Salzach River. The Salzach is a tributary of the Danube, and the brown Danube runs, with its tentacles of tributaries, from west of Bavaria through central Europe to the Black Sea. The salt could be boiled in cylindrical molds, much as it still is in Saharan Africa, and the cylinders could be loaded in barges that traveled the Salzach to Passau, where it entered the Danube, to be traded in Germany or central Europe.

But much of Hallein’s salt was for local use, traveling by river only to Passau, where it was packed on wagons  to be sold in the region. Transporting on land was expensive because tolls were established along the roadways for wagons  carrying salt. The inevitable response was a network of paths over rugged mountain passes for smugglers carrying illegal salt, which they could sell for less because  they paid no tolls.

RIVERS WERE ESSENTIAL to central European saltworks. Halle in central

Germany and Lüneburg in the north, with its famous  founding ham, had the advantage  of the Elbe  with its mouth at the North Sea port of Hamburg. In the late fourteenth century, the Lüneburgers built a canal, the Steckenitz Canal, to connect their salt to the Elbe. They did this not to move salt to nearby Hamburg  but to ship it to Lübeck, on a tributary to the Baltic, because Lübeck was the trading center of the Hanseatic League.

In the Middle Ages, no German salt enjoyed as great an international reputation as that of Lüneburg, and the Hanseatics shipped it to the herring  fisheries  of  southern  Sweden, to  Riga,  to  Danzig,  and throughout the  Baltic. At a time  when the  Hanseatic  League was considered the guarantor of quality, Lüneburg salt was considered the Hanseatic salt. Lesser German saltworks would fraudulently mark their barrels with the word Lüneburg to obtain entry to foreign markets.

The salt in Lüneburg, Halle, and other German saltworks was made by drawing the brine in buckets and carrying it to boiling sheds, where it was dumped in a huge rectangular iron pan. The pan sat on a wood- burning furnace. Blood was added, which caused  a scum to rise with boiling. The scum drew impurities and was skimmed off with care. The salt maker needed to  continually  stir the  liquid. Shortly before crystallization,  beer  was added to  further draw  impurities  from the crystals, which were then placed to dry in conical baskets.

With the pans in use twenty-four hours a day, except for a once-a- week cleaning,  the  entire  operation  required  only three  people:  a master salter, an assistant, and a boy to stoke the furnace. This staff was often simply a man, his wife, and a son. It was easy for a family to go into the salt business. But in Lüneburg the business did not remain in the family because, one by one, Hanseatic merchants bought them out and gained control of a single large saltworks.

TH E SALZKAMMERGUT DEVELOPED its  own salt-mining  culture.  Saint Barbara was its patron saint, and miners observed her day, December 4, by performing traditional dances  in their own dress uniforms, which, by the nineteenth century,  included a black  wool jacket  with brass buttons and epaulets and a black velvet hat with silk buttons and a goldemblem of two crossed pickaxes.

The Dürnberg mine has nineteen miles of tunneling. The main tunnel was built in 1450, but the current timber shoring is only 100 years old.

The tunnels were built with seven-foot ceilings and wide enough for a man to walk through comfortably. But the pressure of the mountain’s weight slowly compresses them. It was in such compressed ancient shafts  that medieval  miners discovered  the remains  of their Celtic predecessors. Today, one of the 400-year-old  tunnels is only about eighteen inches wide in parts. Another seventeenth-century tunnel is about three feet wide.

The tunnels, shored  up with timber, have walls  of dark rock with white streaks of salt crystals. In some spots the rock is spotted with fossils of shellfish and other marine life. Miners would ride on steep, smooth wooden slides, which propelled them at considerable speed down to tunnels sometimes as far as 100 feet lower. Some of the slides are more than 350 feet long. A cable on the right side provided a brake for the practiced gloved hands of the miners.

Dürnberg  has been hosting visitors since  at least the end of the seventeenth century, when tours were a special treat for elite guests of the archbishop  of Salzburg. Centuries  ago it  was realized  that the slides  could be fun. A miner at  the top and five or six guests,  all hugging each other, slid down as if they were in a roller coaster car.

The mine also has about twenty-five underground lakes for boat rides.

MUCH OF THE salt of central Europe eventually came under the control of the Hapsburgs. From their beginnings in tenth-century Alsace, and as their rule spread across central Europe, the Hapsburg family controlled salt mines. In 1273, a Hapsburg became Rudolf I, king of Germany, who enlarged his holdings by conquering Bohemia. The Hapsburgs gained  control  of  the  Danube, Silesia,  Hungary,  and the  southern region of Poland known as Galicia. For a time they even had Spain and all its New World possessions as well as the Netherlands, Naples, Sardinia, Sicily, and Venice.

The Hapsburgs established a salt monopoly, controlling production, transport, and wholesale trade. Bohemia, one of the wealthier regions of Europe, was saltless, an eager market for other Hapsburg holdings in what is today Germany, Austria, and southern Poland.

Hungary was another salt-poor region that came under Hapsburg rule.  In sixteenth-century  Hungary,  with  an economy based on the export of food, there were only four important food imports: spices, wine, herring, and salt. Much of the export of food depended  on the import of salt. Pig fat was a staple for both eating and preserving other food. From the seventeenth century on, fat was included in wages. A high-fat diet was considered a sign of wealth, and city people luxuriated in more fat than peasants. An 1884 study showed that rural Hungarians ate an average per capita of forty pounds of cured—salted or  smoked—fat,  whereas  city dwellers  consumed  an average  per person of fifty-six pounds  of fat. This does not include the significant amount of rendered animal fat that was eaten like butter, not to mention butter itself.

Cooking with melted fat rather than preserved pieces was an eighteenth-century innovation—a refinement for the upper classes. The traditional fat was made by opening  a freshly slaughtered  pig and removing whole the thick outer layer of fat. This was then preserved in dry salt, after which it was smoked, except in the Great Plain, the flat grain-growing  region  east  of  the  Danube, where  it  was air-dried.

Peasants made thick soups that began by melting down pieces of this salted  fat,  which produced  an oil for frying the  rest  of the  soup’s ingredients, and cracklings which were sprinkled on top.

SOUTHERN POLAND WAS the site of ancient springs where as early as 3500 B.C., brine was gathered and boiled in clay pots. But gradually these springs dried up. In 1247, miners began digging in the earth to get at the rock salt that had hardened at the sources of the brine. In 1278, the Polish Crown took possession of the mine but leased its operation  to a succession of entrepreneurs,  which included  Poles, both Jewish and Christian, French, Germans, and Italians. They made payments to the controlling monarch and offered salt at discount rates to aristocracy.

At first, salt miners, often prisoners of war, were worked to death in slave conditions. Not until the fourteenth century, when free men began working the mines, did it become  less than a death sentence. In the sixteenth century, the mines went deeper, and huge pulley systems powered  by teams  of eight horses  hoisted  the salt to the  surface.

Horses that were brought in to work the mines spent their entire lives below ground.

There are mountains  in which the salt goes down very deep, particularly  at  Wieliczka  and Bochnia.  Here  on the  fifth of January, 1528, I climbed  down fifty ladders in order to see for myself and there in the depths observed workers, naked because  of the heat, using iron tools to dig out a most valuable hoard of salt from these inexhaustible mines, as if it had been gold and silver.—Olaus Magnus, A Description of the Northern Peoples, 1555 The Polish Crown earned one-third of its annual revenues from the salt of these two mines near Cracow, Wieliczka and Bochnia.

In 1689, the mines began offering miners daily Catholic services at their  underground   place-of-work.  The miners  of  Wieliczka  began carving religious figures out of rock salt. Three hundred feet below the surface, miners carved a chapel out of rock salt with statues and bas- relief scenes along the floor, walls, and ceiling. They even fashioned elaborate chandeliers from salt crystals.

Increasingly, the mine had visitors. In the early seventeenth century, as in Dürnberg,  the  Crown  began to  bring  special  guests,  mostly royalty. They came to dance in ballrooms, dine in carved dining rooms, be rowed  in underwater  lagoons. In 1830, the Wieliczka  Salt Mine Band, which still performs, was started because of the quality of the acoustics in the mine.

The Wieliczka  mine  and that of  nearby  Bochnia  were  near  the Vistula, which flowed  a few miles  north to Cracow and then on to Warsaw and finally to the Baltic. Any salt with a water route to the Baltic  had a huge market.  But  the Baltic  port also  meant  that the coarse, dark gray rock salt of southern Poland had to compete with sea salt from France and Portugal. The Portuguese sold their Setúbal salt to the Hanseatics, who sold it in Holland  and Denmark. By the sixteenth century, cheap, white Setúbal salt had also become popular

in Poland and other Baltic countries. The Polish Crown responded by protecting its own salt with a ban on the import of all foreign sea salt.

See the Grand Hall in the Wieliczka salt mine in 1867. The walls, ceiling, floor, chandeliers, and statues are all made from salt. Culver Pictures

IN 1772, POLAND was partitioned between Austria, Prussia, and Russia —vanished as a nation until after World War I. In acquiring the Galicia region,  the  Austrian  Hapsburgs  gained  control  of  Wieliczka  and Bochnia. The salt of these  mines  was sold  not only in Poland  but throughout the Hapsburg Empire and in Russia. The huge nation of Russia had a considerable demand  for salt, especially to preservemeat  and vegetables  through a long and barren winter.  Salting  or corning beef in most societies was reserved for lesser cuts such as the brisket, which is the breast cut under the first five ribs, or the round, the toughest leg cut. But in Russia, beef was often frozen solid in the ground and sawed  up with little regard for different cuts.

Salt  was  transported  by camel-drawn  carts  to the railroad at Lake Baskuntschak, in the southern Urals of Russia, circa 1929.

The following recipe comes from A Gift to Young Housewives, by Elena Molokhovets. Molokhovets and her book, which she continually revised between 1861 and 1917—poignant years wedged between the emancipation of the serfs  and the Communist revolution—were well known in Russian households

SOLONINA (SALTED BEEF)

Use a towel to rub off any blood from freshly slaughtered beef. This must be done while the carcass is still warm because the blood very quickly spoils the meat. Remove the very large bones, weight the meat, and rub it all over with salt that has been dried in the oven and mixed with saltpeter and spices. Lay out the meat on a table to cool completely. Then pack into small barrels, placing the large pieces in the middle and small half-pound pieces around the edges so as not to leave any gaps. Press the meat lightly with a pounder. Sprinkle salt, saltpeter, bay leaves, rosemary, and allspice on the bottom of the barrel and over each layer of meat as the barrel is filled. When the barrel is full, cover it with a lid, seal with tar on all sides, and keep in a [warm] room for two to three days, every day turning the barrel over, first on one end then on the other. Transfer the barrel to the cold cellar, and then turn it over twice a week. After three weeks, store the barrel on ice.

Use the following proportions of salt and spices. For one and a half poods of meat

(1 pood = 36.113 U.S. pounds so this is about 54 pounds), use two and a half pounds well-dried salt, six zolotniki (1 zolotnik = about 1 U.S. teaspoon) saltpeter, and three lots  (1 lot = about one half ounce or a tablespoon) each coriander, marjoram, basil, bay leaf, allspice, and black pepper. Add garlic if desired. Sprinkle a little extra salt into those barrels that will be used later.

The barrels must be small and made of oak, because when a barrel is unsealed and the meat is exposed to the air, it soon  spoils. The barrels must be sealed all over, to prevent the juice from leaking.

Before  salting  the  meat,  the  barrels  should  be soaked and disinfected.—Elena Molokhovets, A Gift to Young Housewives

THE MOST COMMON salt-cured vegetables from Alsace to the Urals were cucumbers and cabbage—pickles and sauerkraut. The importance in central Europe of lactic fermentation of vegetables, commonly known as pickling, is best expressed by the Lithuanians, who recognize a guardian spirit of pickling named Roguszys.

In any pickling it is crucial to prevent exposure to the air, which leads to rot rather than fermentation. This is accomplished either by careful sealing, as in the  beef recipe above, or by keeping the  food submerged in brine by weights. Sand is used as the weight in the following recipe.

SOLENYE OGURTSY (SALTED CUCUMBERS)

Dry out very clean river sand and pass it through a fine sieve. Spread a layer of this sand, the thickness of your palm, on the bottom of a barrel. Add a layer of clean black currant  leaves,  dill,  and horseradish   cut  into  pieces,  followed  by a layer  of cucumbers. Cover the cucumbers with another layer of leaves, dill, and horseradish, topped with a layer of sand. Continue in this manner until the barrel is full. The last layer over the cucumbers must be currant leaves, with sand on the very top. Prepare the brine as follows: For one pail of water, use one and a half pounds of salt. Bring to a boil, cool, and cover the cucumbers completely with the brine. Replenish the brine as it evaporates. Before any kind of salting, cucumbers must be soaked for 12–15 hours in ice water.—Elena Molokhovets, A Gift to Young Housewives

Copper ions could leach into the food from copper pans, brightening colors,  especially  the  green  of  vegetables.  It  made pickles  look beautiful but troubled the digestion, which has little tolerance for copper. Molokhovets gave this warning:

Purchased cucumbers are sometimes very attractive, that is, green as a result  of being  prepared  in an untinned  copper vessel,  which is  extremely  harmful to  your health.  To check whether the greenness of the cucumbers is really a result of this preparation, stick a clean steel needle into a cucumber. The needle will turn a copper color in a short time if the cucumbers have been adulterated.

The amount of salt used in sauerkraut in Russia and Poland depended on the economic status of the family. Families that could afford to do so used not only salt but seasoning, such as caraway seeds, dill, and in southern Poland, cherry leaves. In Moravia  apples and onions were added. The Moravians also added bread to speed up fermentation. In Poland, making sauerkraut was a community ritual every fall after the potato harvest. Women would slice the cabbage, scald it in hot water, and place it in barrels—sometimes in wood-lined ditches  in the  ground.  Then men would  pound  it with clubs  or by stamping  their feet  to prevent  air bubbles,  which could  cause rot. Women then covered  the cabbage with linen and lids weighted  by heavy stones  to  make sure  the  vegetable  remained  completely submerged. An annual dance marked the occasion when the year’s supply of sauerkraut had been covered. But the work was not finished. The cloth had to be periodically cleaned, mold scraped off the lids, and water added to keep the cabbage  submerged for two weeks before it could be stored in a cellar for the entire winter.

In Poland and Russia, sauerkraut was an ingredient to be used in other dishes. Whole cabbages  would be included with the sliced ones because the whole  pickled  leaves  were  needed for golabki,  which means “pigeon” but is actually cabbage stuffed  with buckwheat and meat. The brine was used as a soup base. Sometimes the sauerkraut was squeezed for the juice and the cabbage pieces discarded.

The Polish national dish, bigos, is sauerkraut to which meat, bacon, pickled plums, and other fruits are added. The dish, a kind of Polish choucroute, was made in past centuries in a clearing  in the forest.

Hunters, generally aristocrats, would come to the clearing to add their g a m e . Pan   Tadeusz, a  poem of  rural  life  in  Lithuania,  today considered the Polish national poem, describes bigos.

The bigos is being cooked. No words can tell The wonder of its color, taste, and smell.

Mere words and rhymes are jingling sounds, whose sense

No city stomach really comprehends.

For Lithuanian food and song, you ought

To have good health and country life and sport.

But bigos e’en without such sauce is good, of vegetables curiously brewed.

The basis of it is sliced sauerkraut,

Which, as they say, just walks into the mouth;

Enclosed within a caldron, its moist breast Lies on the choicest meat, in slices pressed. There it is parboiled till the heat draws out The living juices from the cauldron’s spout, and all the air is fragrant with the smell.

—Adam Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz, 1832

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Leaving of Liverpool

IN THE LIST of great rivers that played essential roles in the history of salt

—the  Yangtze,  the  Nile,  the  Tiber  and  the  Po,  the  Elbe  and  the Danube, the  Rhône  and the  Loire—a  gurgling  mud-bottomed waterway that flows for only seventy miles from the English midlands to the Irish Sea has to be included: the River Mersey.

The importance of the Mersey lay not in the goods it carried those few dozen miles into England but in what it carried from England to the world. The last three miles of the river form a sheltered, deepwater harbor, and in 1207, King  John granted  permission for a town to  be built  there,  which  was  called  Liverpool.  Originally  Liverpool  was  the port that connected Ireland with England. But in time it became England’s  most  important  port  after  London. It  was the  port  of West Indian sugar, the port of the slave trade, the Industrial Revolution port that brought iron to coal and then shipped out steel. But before any of this,  it  was  the port  of English  salt,  Cheshire  salt,  or, as  it  became known all over the world, Liverpool salt.

WHEN THE ROMANS came  to  England  in A.D. 43, they found  the  Britons making  salt  by pouring  brine  on hot  charcoal  and scraping  off  the crystals that formed. To the Romans, this was a sign of pitiful backwardness, and being the model imperialists, they taught these primitive locals the right way to make salt—by evaporating brine in earthen  pots  and then  smashing  the  pots  to  expose  white  cakes  of salt. The Romans started saltworks along the entire east coast. They established London in their first year in Britain, and, remembering how Ostia  provided  for the  growth of Rome, they developed  saltworks  in Essex to provide for what they hoped would become a major port city on the Thames.

The Romans were drawn to the thick forest of northwestern England, probably for fuel, because  the peat they had been using to evaporate brine on the coast was becoming scarce. In the northwest they found a place  the  locals  knew by the  Celtic  name Hellath  du, which  meant “black pit.” By the time the Romans reached this area, later known as Cheshire, it  had been producing salt for centuries. The earliest evidence  of salt making  in Cheshire, pottery fragments  dated  to  600 B.C.,   shows  that   the   Britons   had  long   known the   “new”   Roman technique.

The neighboring area, what is today North Wales, had silver mines. When the silver was extracted, lead remained, which the Romans used to make huge pans, some weighing more than 300 pounds, for boiling brine in Hellath du, the first pan-evaporated salt in England. The locals too learned to evaporate in lead pans, but preferred a nearby location called Hellath Wenn, white pit, and not by coincidence this produced a whiter salt.

In  time,  Hellath  du acquired  the  Anglo  Saxon  name  Northwich, northern saltworks. Anglo  Saxons  called  a saltworks  a wich, and any place in England where the name ends in “wich” at one time produced salt.  Hellath  Wenn became  Nantwich,  and  between  Nantwich  and Northwich was Middlewich.

By the ninth century, the area by the mouth of the Mersey, Cheshire, had  become  an  important  salt-producing  region.  The  commercial center was Chester, where, in the eleventh century, the Roman-built fort was the last Saxon fortress to fall to William the Conqueror, completing the Norman conquest of England. In 1070, to crush the resistance, the Normans destroyed Chester and its saltworks, and in the decades  that it     took    Chester    to    rebuild,    Droitwich,    south    of    Cheshire    in Worcestershire, emerged as England’s leading salt producer.

CHESTER  WAS ON the River Dee, which had an estuary that provided a deepwater port similar to that of the Mersey. Once Liverpool was founded on the Mersey, the two towns, with their two parallel rivers only a few miles apart, were competitors until the Dee began silting up and all the trade shifted to Liverpool.

For centuries, Bristol was a more important port, even a more important salt port, than Liverpool. This was due not to the exportation of British salt, but to the many ships carrying imported Portuguese and French sea salt that docked there. British salt-works could not provide the sea salt needed for British fisheries. Even when the English made a special high-quality salt for the cure of the best herring, a salt called white on white, they made it with French sea salt, dissolving the French salt in water and reevaporating it to remove impurities.

The market for salt fish proved more durable than the religious convictions that created it. Even after 1533, when Henry VIII broke with the Roman Church, a lenten meat eater was still subject to an array of penalties including three months’ imprisonment and public humiliation. By this time the motivation was less religious than economic—the government wanted to support the fishing industry. A 1563 proposal to extend  the  lean days to  twice  a week, adding  Wednesday to  Friday, was supported by the argument that it would build up the fishing fleet. It took twenty-two years of debate, but the idea of a second fast day was finally dropped in 1585. The English people were growing weary of the fast laws, and the Church adapted. The selling of permits to eat meat on fast days was becoming a profitable source of Church revenue.

In 1682, John Collins,  an accountant  to  the  British  Royal  Fishery, wrote a book called Salt and Fishery, Discourse Thereof, inspired by his seven years at sea, from 1642 to 1649, primarily serving with the Venetian fleet fighting  the  Turks. During  this  time, he was obliged  to eat  badly  salted  meat,  evidently  rotting,  which  he said  “stunk.”  This experience, he said, “begat in me a curiosity to pry into the nature of salt.”

Among his  many recipes  was the  following  for curing  salmon. The recipe would still be good today, assuming a fifteen-year-old boy were vailable  for  long  periods  of  jumping.  Though the  fish  is  from  the Scottish-Northumberland border, the salt specified, as was usually the case for curing fish, was French sea salt:

The salmon cured at Berwick. As described by Benjamin Watson, merchant.

1. They are commonly caught from Ladiday [March 25, Feast of the Annunciation when the angel came to Mary] or Michael-mas [September 29, Saint Michael’s Day] either in the river Tweed or within three miles or less off at sea against Berwick.

2. Those caught in the upper part of the river. Brought by horseback to lower part. And those on the lower part thereof on boats to Berwick, fresh.

3. Then they are laid in a pav’d yard, where for curing there are ready 2 splitters and 4 washers.

4. The splitters immediately split them beginning at the tail and continuing to the head, close by the back fin, leaving the Chine of salmon on the under side [the belly intact], taking the guts  clear out and the gils  out of the head, without defacing the least fin and also take out a small bone from the underside, whereby they get to the blood to wash it away.

5. Afterward the fish is put into a great tub, and washed outside and inside and scraped with a mussuel shell or a thin iron like it; and from thence put into another tub  of clean  water, where  they are  washed and scraped  again, and from thence taken out, and laid upon wooden forms, there to lie and dry for four hours.

6. Thence they are carried into the cellars, where they are opened, or layed into a great vat or pipe with the skinside downward and covered all over with French salt and the like upon another lay and so up to the top and are there to remain six weeks. In which time tis found by experience, they will be suffeciently salted.

7. Then a dried calves’ skin is  to be laid on at the top of the Cask, with Stones upon it to keep them down; upon the removal thereof, after 40 days or thereabouts, there will appear a scum at the top about two inches deep, to be scum’d off or taken away.

8. Then the fish is  to be taken out and washed in the pickle, which being done, they are to be carefully laid into barrels, and betwixt every lay, so much salt sprinkled of the remaining melted salt in the vats, as will keep them from sticking together. And after the barrel is  one quarter full, is  to be stamped or leaped upon by a youth of about 15 years old or thereabouts, being coverede with a calves skin, the like at half full, and also when quite full.

9. Then a little salt is to be laid on the top and so to be headed up; and then the Cask is to be hooped by the cooper and blown til it be tight.

10. Then a bunghole  to  be made in the  middle  of the  barrel, about which is to be put a ruff or roll of clay, to serve as a Tonnel whereby frequently to fill the barrel with the pickle that is left in the vat, which will cause the oyle to swim; which ought to be frequently scummed off, and serves for greasing of wool. And thus after 10 or  12 days  to  be  bounded up as  sufficiently  cured,  and fit  for exportation.—John Collins, Salt and Fishery, Discourse Thereof, 1682

EVEN WITHOUT FISH, Cheshire salt had ample uses. Crops to feed both humans and livestock could only be provided until the November harvest. The animals would then be slaughtered and salted to last until spring  grasses  could  support a new herd. Animals  were  slaughtered on Martinmas, November 10, the Saint Day of Martin, an austere Roman soldier in Gaul who converted to Christianity and became the patron   saint   of   reformed   drunkards.   Pre-Christian   religions   also marked November 10 as the day on which animals were slaughtered and salted for the winter, followed by a celebration for which, if they too converted, Saint Martin could grant forgiveness.

English food was extremely salted. Bacon had to be soaked before using.

Take  the  whitest  and youngest  bacon and cutting  away  the sward [rind] cut the collops [slabs] into thin slices, lay them in a dish, and put hot water into them, and so let them stand an hour or two, for that will take away the extreme saltinesse.—Gervase Markham, The English Huswife, 1648

Vegetables were also put up in salt to be used throughout the winter, and they too  had to  be refreshed  before  use. John Evelyn, a notable seventeenth-century English scholar who argued for more vegetables and less meat, gave this recipe for preserving green beans:

Take such as are fresh young and approaching their full growth. Put them into a strong brine of white-wine vinegar and salt able to bear an egg. Cover them very close, and so will they be preserved  twelve  months:  but  a  month  before  you use  them, take  out  what  quantity you think  sufficient  for your  spending  a quarter of a year (for so long the second pickle will keep them sound) and boil them in a skillet of fresh water, till they begin to look green, as they soon will do. Then placing them one by one, (to drain upon a clean course napkin) range them row by row in a  jarr,  and  cover  them  with  vinegar,  and  what  spices  you please; some weight being laid upon them to keep them under the pickle. Thus you may preserve French beans, harico’s etc.

the whole year about.—John Evelyn, Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets, 1699

Butter  was  also  very  salty.  A 1305 recipe  from  the  estate  of the bishop of Winchester called for a pound of salt to be added for every ten pounds of butter. This would produce a butter as salty as Roman garum. The salt was to  preserve  the  butter  rather  than for taste, and numerous medieval writers gave recipes for desalting butter before using, which often entailed mixing with fresh butter.

Butter has the same improbable myth of origin as cheese,  that it accidentally got churned in the animal skins of central Asian nomads. Easily spoiled  in sunlight,  it  was a northern food.  The Celts  and the Vikings, and their descendants, the Normans, are credited with popularizing butter in northern Europe. Southerners remained suspicious and for centuries maintained that the reason more cases  of leprosy were found in the north was that northerners ate butter. Health- conscious  southern clergy and noblemen,  when they had to  travel  to northern   Europe,   would   guard   against   the   dreaded   disease   by bringing their own olive oil with them.

With no refrigeration, unsalted butter quickly becomes rancid. Even the  butter  sold  as  “sweet”  was lightly salted. The English did  have a specialty called May butter, which was fresh spring butter left unsalted in the sunlight for days. The sunlight would destroy the carotene, turning the butter white, and along with the pigment would go all of its vitamin A. It  would become  rancid and, no doubt, smell rancid. But inexplicably, in the  Middle Ages  May butter was considered  a health food.

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.

The English passed  laws against selling  rancid  butter. A 1396 law outlawed  the  use  of salted  yellow  flowers.  In 1662, a butter  law  was passed in England to establish standards. It allowed mixing rancid butter with good and specified that butter could only be salted with fine, not coarse-grained, salt, and it had to be packed with the producers’ first and last name clearly marked.

To preserve butter fresh for long keeping.

Make a brine as before described (salt enough to float an egg) and keep  the  butter  sunk in it. About  the  beginning  of May I caused this to be put into practice and potted up many lumps of butter bought fresh out of the  market, and they all kept sweet, fresh.—John   Collins, Salt  and  Fishery,  Discourse   Thereof, 1682

The Church did not allow butter to be eaten on fast days because  it came from cows. But it also  earned  enormous  profits  selling  special dispensations  to  affluent  people  who could  not  bear going  without butter for the forty days of Lent. Lent aside, butter was cheap food and was more  popular  with the  poor than the  rich. Because  of the  heavy salting, it was available most of the year. Beginning in the sixteenth century, it was even included in the rations of the Royal Navy.

Determined to make butter more than a luxury for a rural elite, northern Europeans consistently tried to preserve it in salt. But getting good, properly preserved butter remained a problem until refrigeration was invented. In fact, the first experiments in refrigeration were not with fish or meat but with everyone’s favorite luxury—butter.

Cheese,  the more successful way to preserve milk and cream, was also   a  popular  salted   food   of  the   poor,  though  only  the   wealthy sampled the full array of English cheeses—some  150 varieties (or at least  this  many were  remaining  in  the  1970s when British  cheese enthusiast   Patrick   Rance   went   on  a  crusade   to   save   traditional English-cheese making).

Cheshire, not surprisingly for a place with both dairy herds and saltworks, produced a great deal of cheese. Cheshire is the oldest known variety of  English cheese   and  is  thought  to  be  more representative  of a medieval  English cheese  than is  cheddar  or the blue-veined Stilton. A hard cheese,  though not as hard as cheddar, it has a distinct flavor thought to come from the salty earth grazed upon by Cheshire cows.

BY  THE SEVENTEENTH century,  the  English  had discovered  that  salted anchovies  would  melt  into  a  sauce.  This  practice  may have existed centuries earlier on the continent, but in  the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, anchovy sauces  became  extremely popular. Grimod  de  La  Reynière,  a  great  eighteenth-century  anchovy sauce enthusiast,  wrote,  “When  this  sauce  has  been made  well,  it  would make you eat an elephant.”

In 1668, a French writer, Pierre Gontier, stated that “anchovies are put in salt in order that they may be preserved, and they become garum.”  Certainly,  the  English  at  the  time  used  anchovy sauce  very much like  garum—a  liquid of preserved  fish that was added to  meat and other dishes as a salty seasoning.

In  eighteenth-century  England,  anchovy sauce  became  known as ketchup, katchup, or catsup.

To make English Katchup

Take a wide  mouth’d  bottle, put therin a pint of the  best white wine  vinegar,  putting  in ten or twelve  cloves  of eschalot  peeled and just bruised; then take a quarter of a pint of the best langoon white wine, boil it a little, and put to it twelve or fourteen [salt cured] anchovies washed and shred, and dissolve them in the wine, and when cold,  put  them  in the  bottle;  then  take  a  quarter  of a  pint more of white wine, and put it in mace, ginger sliced, a few cloves, a spoonful of whole pepper just bruised, and let them boil all a little; when near cold, slice in almost a whole nutmeg, and some lemon peel,  and likewise  put  in two  or three  spoonfuls  of horse radish; then stop it close, and for a week shake it once or twice a day; then use it; it is good to put into fish sauce, or any savory dish of   meat;   you  may  add  it   to   clear   liquor   that   comes   from mushrooms.

E l i z a S m i t h ,

The               Compleat         Housewife,

posthumous 16th edition, 1758 Ketchup  derives  its  name from the  Indonesian fish and soy sauce kecap  ikan. The  names  of  several  other  Indonesian  sauces   also include the word kecap, pronounced KETCHUP, which means a base of dark, thick  soy sauce.  Why would  English garum have an Indonesian name? Because  the  English,  starting  with the  medieval  spice  trade, looked   to   Asia   for   seasoning.   Many  English   condiments,   even Worcestershire  sauce,  invented  in  the  1840s, are  based  on Asian ideas.

Whether it is called garum, anchovy sauce, or ketchup, a large dose of salt  was an essential  ingredient.  Margaret  Dods cautioned  in her 1829 London cookbook that “catsups, to make them keep well, require a great  deal  (of salt).”  The salt  in ketchup  originally came  from salt- cured  fish,  and most  early  anchovy ketchup  recipes,  such as  ElizaSmith’s, do not even list salt as an ingredient because  it is part of the anchovies. But the English and Americans began to move away from having  fish in their  ketchup.  It  became  a mushroom sauce,  a walnut sauce,   or  even  a  salted   lemon  sauce.   These  ketchups  originally included salt anchovies, but as Anglo-Saxon cooking lost its boldness, cooks began to see the presence of fish as a strong flavor limiting the usefulness of the condiment. Roman cooks would have been appalled by the  lack  of  temerity,  but  Margaret  Dods adds  at  the  end of  her walnut ketchup recipe:

Anchovies, garlic, cayenne, etc. are sometimes put to this catsup; but we think this is a bad method, as these flavours may render  it  unsuitable  for some dishes,  and they can be added extempore    when   required.—Margaret     Dods, Cook    and Housewife’s Manual, London, 1829

Ketchup became a tomato sauce, originally called “tomato ketchup” in America,  which  is  appropriate  since  the  tomato  is  an American plant, brought to Europe by Hernán Cortés, embraced in the Mediterranean, and regarded with great suspicion in the North. The first known recipe for “tomato ketchup” was by a New Jersey resident. All that is certain about the date is that it had to be before 1782, the year his unfashionable loyalty to the British Crown forced him to flee to Nova Scotia.

The first published recipe for tomato ketchup appeared in 1812, written by a prominent Philadelphia physician and horticulturist, James Mease. Already in 1804 he had observed, employing the term used for tomatoes in the United States at the time, that “love apples” make “a fine catsup.” Mease said that the condiment was frequently used by the French.  The  French  have  never  been known for  their  fondness  for tomato ketchup, so it is thought, given the date, that the French he was referring to, were planter refugees from the Haitian revolution. To this day, a  tomato  sauce  is  commonly  used  in Haiti  and referred  to  as sauce creole.

LOVE-APPLE CATSUP

Slice the apples  thin, and over every layer sprinkle a little salt; cover them, and let them lie twenty-four hours; then beat them well, and simmer them half an hour in a bell-metal kettle; add mace and allspice. When cold, add two cloves of raw shallots cut small, and half a gill of brandy to each bottle, which must be corked tight, and kept in a cool place.—James Mease, Archives  of Useful  Knowledge, Philadelphia, 1812

Ketchup remained a salted product. Lydia Maria Child, in her 1829 Boston    cookbook, The American  Frugal   Housewife, advised   in making tomato ketchup, “A good deal of salt and spice is needed to keep the product well.”

AT THE END of the seventeenth century, Cheshire salt was still produced from  two   brine   pits   in  Middlewich,   one  in  Nantwich, and  one  at Northwich.  If  a  Chinese  salt  producer  had gone  to  Cheshire  in  the 1500s, he would have been appalled by the primitiveness of the technology.  Shirtless  men climbed  down ladders  into  the  pits,  filled leather buckets with brine, and climbed out to dump the brine in wooden troughs. Then a web of pipes and gutters channeled the brine to the many salt makers in the area. But by 1636, an account of a visit to   the   wiches   mentioned   that   pumps  had  just   been  installed   in Nantwich to raise the brine.

In the eighteenth century, life in England began to change. England experienced an extremely favorable shift in climate that allowed longer growing  seasons  and cheaper food. With food  prices lowered, many English farms failed. Failed farms in turn created a workforce for industry.

The English, before anyone else, believed industry was the answer to all problems. Agro-industry, which abandoned the goal of producing the best food and strived to produce the most per acre, was an English invention. Wheat crops increased enormously. New feed, such as turnips, kept livestock eating all year. Starting with Jethro Tull’s seed- planting drill of 1701, which planted three rows at once, a new agricultural invention, a new crossbred plant, a new strain of livestock, or a new tool was invented almost every year in eighteenth-century Britain. This was the beginning of modern agriculture, a system that would  produce  enormous  surpluses  of food  in industrialized  nations and still fail to end hunger in the world.

These  new developments  in agriculture  meant  that  food  could  be produced  throughout the  year, which meant less dependency on salt. Less salt seemed a modern idea. But salt production was increasing. Just as  the  Roman occupiers  had run out of peat, English saltworks were now running out of trees.

The fule which was heretofore used was all wood, which since the iron works is destroyed, that all the wood at any reasonable distance will not supply the works with one quarter of the year; so that now we use almost all pit coal which is brought to us by land,  from  13 or  14 miles  difference.—Dr. Thomas Rastel, Droitwich, 1678

By 1650, little was left of the forests of Cheshire. The lead pans by this time were each almost as big as a room and were installed on top of coal-fired furnaces. Hauling coal to Cheshire became a major expense of salt production. Salt makers began to wonder if there might not be coal underneath Cheshire. They were surrounded by coal regions.  In  Whitehaven,  not  far  north  of  them  in  Cumberland,  and farther up near Glasgow at the mouth of the Clyde, salt was made and sold  at  a  much lower  price  than  Cheshire’s  product  because  these saltworks had their own coal fields.

Elizabeth I, concerned about England’s dependence on French salt, had guaranteed state-controlled markets to salt producers along the Tyne in Northumberland. She had chosen that region for stimulating production because it had coal for cheap fuel.

Cheshire had salt, a river, and an Atlantic port. Its salt makers could have provided salt to a world in which British influence was rapidly expanding—if only they had cheap fuel. The Cheshire  salt producers went coal prospecting. In 1670, John Jackson prospected for coal on the  estate  of William Marbury near Northwich and, at a depth of only 105 feet, found a bed of solid rock salt and no coal at all.

The Royal  Society published  the  news first  with  great  excitement. Had Jackson discovered  the  source  of underground  brine?  Was it a buried  seabed?   In  1682, John Collins  wrote  of  Cheshire,  “These springs being remote from the sea  are conceived to arise from rocks or Mines  of salt  under the  earth,  the  which  are  moistened  by some channels or secret passages under ground.”

But Marbury, disappointed that Jackson had found no coal, did not think to mine the rock salt and went bankrupt in 1690. In 1693, another Cheshire landowner, Sir Thomas Warburton, found rock salt under his estate, and four years later he owned one of four rock salt mines that opened in Cheshire.

Rock  salt  did  not  need  fuel,  but  the  immediate  reaction  of  the Cheshire  brine  boilers  was to  lobby parliament for a bill banning  the mining of rock salt. They believed that the discovery would change the nature of Cheshire, that the small-scale entrepreneur with a modest investment in a well and some lead pans would be pushed out by large and well-capitalized mining companies.

But with the discovery of rock salt, the growing salt industry gained the economic importance to persuade the government to construct canals.  Between 1713 and 1741, the  government  built  a network  of waterways linking the saltworks with the Mersey. By the end of the century, salt refineries were being established along the Mersey, and a salt warehouse was built on the Liverpool docks. Coal from south Lancashire on the opposite bank of the Mersey could be transported cheaply by barge. The salt industry, the  coal industry, and the  port of Liverpool fed off of each other and together grew prosperous.

Unfortunately for Scotland, Cheshire achieved its new position of power and influence just in time to affect Scotland’s union with England in 1707. After James II, a  Catholic, was  deposed  in England, Presbyterianism was guaranteed for Scotland and the last obstacle to unification   was   removed.   The  Scottish   and  English   parliaments merged.   But   adding   Scotland   meant   bringing   Scottish   salt   into England, and Cheshire merchants had added to the treaty of union numerous stipulations on salt production and pricing aimed at preventing  Scottish salt from competing  with Cheshire. This was one of several  reasons  the  union had an acrimonious  beginning. Almost thirty  years  before  they  were  joined,  John Collins  had warned  “that unless moderated in its customs” salt competition would breed enmity between England and Scotland.

Meanwhile, Cheshire salt makers would not give up on the idea that the coal beds around them extended to their region. As late as 1899, they drilled a shaft a mile deep. But again, they found only salt.

EVEN    BEFORE     TRUE industrialization   had   overtaken   England,   the industrial degradation of the environment was an accepted way of life in Cheshire. Cheshire merchants would look with pride at the sky, blackened twenty-four hours a day from clouds of smoke from the salt pan furnaces, and note the industriousness of their region.

The forests  of Cheshire  had been chopped down to  fuel furnaces. Barren white  scars  were  etched  into  the  pastureland,  where  the  pan scale, the residue that had to be periodically chipped off the salt pans, was dumped. And the earth itself was beginning to collapse.

In 1533, it was reported that the land near Combermere, Cheshire, had fallen in, creating  a pit that filled  with saltwater. In 1657, another little  salt  pond appeared  at  Bickley.  In  1713, a  hole  appeared  just south of Winsford  in a place  called  Weaver  Hall. All of these  funnel- shaped holes were in proximity to salt production, and they all immediately filled with brine. Many locals believed that the holes were the result of abandoned salt mines collapsing. But mining interests pointed out that the sinkholes were not appearing near abandoned shafts. By the last two decades  of the eighteenth century, when a new hole sunk every year or two, it started to appear that there was a relationship between the increasing quantities of salt being produced and the collapsing of the earth.

DESPITE  CHESHIRE’S  GROWING production,  England  still  had that  same dangerous dependence on foreign salt that had worried Queen Elizabeth.  During  the  seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,  it  was a recurring  topic  of concern,  especially  since  much of the  foreign  salt came  from England’s  principal  enemy, France.  On land  campaigns, each British soldier received a huge ration of salt so that he could acquire fresh meat along his march and salt it to use as needed. The British navy was provisioned with salt and salt foods. Salt was strategic, like gunpowder, which was also made from salt.

In 1746, Thomas Lowndes, a Cheshire native, wrote a book-length report  to  the  admiralty  on developing  Britain’s  own sea  salt  supply. After studying French and Dutch salt, he, with great excitement, announced that he had discovered the secret of superior salt:

This is the Process

Let a Cheshire Salt-pan (which commonly contains about eight hundred gallons) be filled with Brine, to within about an inch of the top; then make and light the fire;

and when the  Brine  is  just  lukewarm,  put  in about  an ounce of blood  from  the butcher’s, or the whites of two eggs: let the pan boil with all possible violence; as the scum rises take it off; when the fresh or watery part is pretty well decreased, throw into the pan the third part of a pint of new ale, or that quantity of bottoms of malt drink: upon the Brine’s beginning to grain, throw into it the quantity of a small nutmeg of fresh  butter;  and when the  liquor has  salted  for about  half  an hour, that  is,  has produced a good deal of salt, draw the pan, in other words, take out the salt. By this time the fire will be greatly abated, and so will the heart of the liquor. Let no more fuel be thrown on the fire; but let the brine gently cool, till one can just bear to put one’s hand into it: keep the brine of that heat as near as possible; and when it has worked for some time, and is beginning to grain, throw in the quantity of a small nutmeg of fresh butter, and about two minutes after that, scatter threw the pan, as equally as may be, an ounce and three quarters  of clean common allom pulverized very fine; and then instantly, with the common iron-scrape-pan, stir the brine very briskly in every part of the pan, for about a minute: then let the pan settle, and constantly feed the  fire,  so that  the  brine  may never  be quite  scalding  hot,  nor near  so cold  as lukewarm: let the pan stand working thus, for about three days and nights, and then draw it.

The brine remaining will by this time be so cold, that it will  not work at all; therefore fresh coals must be thrown upon the fire, and the brine must boil for about half an hour, but not near so violently as  before  the  first  drawing:  then,  with the  usual  instrument,  take out  such salt  as  is  beginning  to  fall, (as  they term  it)  and out  it apart; now let the pan settle and cool. When the brine becomes no hotter than one can just bear to put one’s hand into it, proceed in all respects as before; only let the quantity of allom not exceed an ounce and a quarter. And in about eight and forty hours after draw the pan.—Thomas Lowndes, Brine-salt Improved, or The Method of Making Salt from Brine, That Shall Be as Good or Better Than French Bay-salt, 1746

Lowndes assured  the  admiralty, “The greater the  quantity is of salt made my way, the more satisfied the public will be, that my secret is truly made known.” But, understandably, some found  his secret to  be excessive  for just making  salt, a product whose commercial success depended  on low  production  costs.  Two years  later,  the  physician William  Brownrigg  in  a  widely  distributed  work, The Art of Making Common Salt, criticized  Lowndes’ formula, writing  that “a purer and stronger salt can be made, and at less expense.”

Cheshire salt needed to be not only better but, even more important, cheaper.  Almost  seventy-five  years  earlier,  Dr.  Thomas  Rastel  of Droitwich had written that Droitwich had simplified salt making, eliminating the cost of blood used in Cheshire brine by making an egg white  scum, a technique  still used in cooking  to  remove  impurities in meat stocks for a clear aspic:

For clarifying  we use nothing  but the  whites  of eggs,  of which we take  a quarter of a white  and put it into  a gallon or two  of brine,  which being  beaten with the  hand, lathers  as  if  it  were soap, a small quantity of which froth put into each vat raises all scum, the  white  of  one egg  clarifying  20 bushels  of  salt,  by which means our salt  is  as  white  as  anything  can be: neither has it any ill savour, as that salt has that is clarified with blood. For granulating it we use nothing for the brine is so strong itself, that unless it be often stirred, it will  make salt as large grained

as bay-salt.—Dr. Thomas Rastel, 1678

The goal was always to make bay salt, salt that resembled the sea salt of Bourgneuf Bay, because  this was the salt of the fisheries. Lowndes mentioned in his treatise that he had received a letter from a Captain Masters, dated June 5, 1745, estimating that the Newfoundland cod fishery used “at least ten thousand tons” of salt annually.

An eighteenth-century  English  engraving  of  codfish being  salted  and dried in  Newfoundland. The Granger

Collection

Between 1713 and 1759, through nearly global warfare with France, England had acquired most of the codfish grounds of North America. The English were  excited  about  their  new cod potential.  But  even a decade  before  they had achieved  their  greatest victories, Brownrigg had warned that in order to take advantage of the acquisition of Cape Breton alone, the French end of Nova Scotia, England would have to increase its supply of salt.

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

CHAPTER TWELVE

American Salt Wars

STUDYING A ROAD map of almost anywhere in North America, noting the whimsical nongeometric  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. Animals get the salt they need by finding brine springs, brackish water, rock salt, any natural salt available for licking. The licks, found throughout the continent, were  often a flat area  of several acres  of barren, whitish brown or whitish gray earth. Deep holes, almost caves, were formed by the constant licking. The lick at the end of the road, because it had a salt supply, was a suitable place for a settlement.

Villages were built at the licks. A salt lick near Lake Erie had a wide road made by buffalo, and the town started there was named Buffalo, New York.

When Europeans arrived, they found a great deal of salt making in North American villages. In 1541, Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, traveling up the Mississippi, noted: “The salt is made along a river, which, when the water goes down, leaves it upon the sand. As they cannot gather the salt without a large mixture of sand, it is thrown into certain baskets they have made for the purpose, made large at the mouth and small at the bottom. These are set in the air on a ridge pole;

and water being thrown on, vessels are placed under them wherein it may fall, then being strained  on the fire it is boiled away, leaving salt at the bottom.”

Hunter groups that did not farm did not make salt. An exception was the Bering Strait Eskimo, who took reindeer, mountain sheep, bear, seal, walrus, and other game  and boiled it in seawater to give a salty taste. Many, such as the Penobscot, Menomini, and Chippewa, never used salt  before  Europeans  arrived.  Jesuit  missionaries  in Huron country complained  that there  was no salt,  though one missionary suggested  that  Hurons  had better  eyesight  than  the  French  and attributed this to abstinence from wine, salt, and “other things capable of drying up the humors of the eye and impairing its tone.”

The Puget Sound Indians, whose diet was largely salmon, were said to eat no salt. The Mohegan  of Connecticut ate  great quantities of lobster, clams, shad, lamprey, and also corn, but, according to Cotton Mather, “They had not a grain of salt in the world until we bestowed iton them.”

But the Delaware salted their cornmeal. The Hopi boiled beans and squash with salt  and served  jackrabbit  that was stewed  with chili peppers and wild onions in salted water. The Zuni served boiled salted dumplings in a brine sauce and made kushewe, a salty bread of lime and salted  suet. When a Zuni  traveled, he always  carried a jar or earthen box of salt along  with one of red chile, a blend  that would remain a classic seasoning of the Southwest.

IN THE SEVENTH month of their year, the Aztecs observed ceremonies for Vixtociatl, who was banished to the saltwaters by her brothers the rain gods, and thus she was the discoverer of salt, the inventor of salt making. The sixteenth century Spanish friar Bernardino  de Sahagun described her appearance: ears of gold, yellow clothes, an iridescent green plumage, and a fishnet skirt. She carried a shield trimmed with eagle, parrot, and quetzal feathers, and she beat time with a cane topped by incense-filled paper flowers. The girl chosen  to represent Vixtociatl danced  for ten days with women who had made  salt. Finally, on the festival day, two slaves were killed, and then the girl too was sacrificed.

Many indigenous North American cultures have a salt deity, almost always  female.  For  the  Navajo,  it  is  an elderly  woman. Among agricultural people of the U.S. Southwest and Mexico, expeditions to gather salt  were  often  initiated  with great  ceremonies. Among the Hopi, this included copulation with a woman designated “the salt woman.”  Among many southwestern  groups,  salt  gathering  was organized by religious leaders. Usually, participants had to be initiated into a cult of salt gatherers. Often only members of a privileged clan, such as the Laguna’s parrot clan, could go on salt expedition. In most cultures only men were allowed to gather salt, but the Navajo allowed women also. The Zuni, according to legend, originally allowed both, but their frivolity on the mission offended the salt goddess and the salt supply started to vanish. So they changed the custom to men only. The entire Zuni population prayed for the safe return of the salt expedition.

When the men returned, the paternal aunt of each salt gatherer would wash his head  and body with yucca  suds.

THE HISTORY  OF the Americas  is  one of constant  warfare over  salt. Whoever controlled salt was in power. This was true before Europeans arrived, and it continued  to be the reality until after the American Civil War.

As on the Italian peninsula, all the great centers of civilization on the American continents were founded in places with access to salt. The Incas were salt producers, with salt wells just outside Cuzco. In Colombia, nomadic tribesmen probably first built permanent settlements because they needed salt and learned how to make it. Their society was organized around natural brine springs. The Chibcha, a highland  tribe living in the area that was to become  the modern capital of Bogotá, became a dominant group because they were the best salt makers. In yet another example of the association between sex and salt for twentieth-century psychologists to ponder, the Chibcha salt lords honored the gods two times a year by abstaining from sex and salt.

As in Africa, the Chibchas made salt by evaporating brine into cone shapes. Befitting a multiclass  society,  various  grades  of salt  were produced, from the whitest for the rich to a black, unpleasant-tasting salt for the  poor. All the natural brine springs  of the Chibcha  were owned by the monarch, the zipa, who ruled by virtue of his ability to distribute salt. When the Spanish came, having an understanding of the power of kings, they took over the brine springs and declared them property of their king, thus destroying the authority of the zipas.

According  to  Bernal  Díaz,  the  chronicler  of  Hernán  Cortés’s conquest,  the Aztecs  made salt  from evaporating  urine. A tribe  in Honduras plunged hot sticks into the ocean and scraped off the salt, just as the Romans  had observed the Britons doing. More commonly, brine from natural springs was evaporated, or desert salt beds were scraped like the sebkhas  of the Sahara, or sea salt was raked from the ocean’s edges.

The Aztecs controlled the salt routes by military power  and were able to deny their enemies, such as Tlxalacaltecas, access to salt. William Prescott’s 1819 classic, History of the Conquest of Mexico, described  the  Aztecs  receiving   tribute  from  their  subjects:  “2000 loaves  of very white  salt,  refined  in the  shape of a mold,  for  the consumption only of the lords of Mexico.”

The Spanish  took  power  by taking  over  the  saltworks  of  the indigenous people they conquered. Cortés, who came from southern Spain, not far from both Spanish and Portuguese saltworks, understood the power and politics of salt. He observed with admiration how the Tlatoque had maintained their independence and avoided the oppression of the Aztecs by abstaining from salt. “They ate no salt because there was none in their land,” he wrote, and like the British, they feared salt dependency.

THE EARLIEST EVIDENCE that has been found of Mayan salt production is dated at about 1000 B.C., but remains of earlier salt-works have been found  in non-Mayan  Mexico such as Oaxaca. It  may be an exaggeration to claim that the great Mayan civilization rose and fell over salt. However, it rose by controlling salt production and prospered on the ability to trade salt, flourishing in spite of constant warfare over control of salt sources. By the time Europeans arrived, the civilization was in a state of decline, and one of the prime indicators of this was a breakdown in its salt trade.

The Mayan world extended from Yucatán to the present-day Mexican state of Chiapas and across Guatemala. When Hernán Cortés first went to the Yucatán peninsula in the early sixteenth century, he found a Mayan people with a large salt industry and an extensive trade not only in salt but in salted goods such as salt fish and cured hides.

The Mayans used salt as medicine mixed with marjoram and xul tree leaves  for  birth control,  with oil  for epilepsy,  with honey  to  lessen childbirth pains. It was also used in rituals associated with both birth and death.

In the Yucatán, salt was made from solar evaporation at least 2,000 years  ago, meaning  that indigenous Americans  have been making solar-evaporated sea salt for at least as long as have Europeans. The Mayans also knew how to extract salt from plants, although plant salt is usually potassium chloride rather than sodium chloride. They would burn plants, certain types of palms as well as grasses, and soak their ashes into  a brine  that was then evaporated.  This  technique  was practiced by isolated forest people throughout the Americas and in Africa.

The Lacandon  of Chiapas  are  an isolated  and culturally distinct Mayan   group   who  lived   self-sufficiently   in  a  rain   forest   that, unfortunately for them, became  the Mexican-Guatemalan border. They made salt from burning a certain species of palm, and they used this salt as money. Dressing in long white gowns, the Lacandon paddled canoes  in their rain forest and lived an undisturbed and unique way of life  until  the   twentieth   century,  when the  modern  Mexican  and Guatemalan states became concerned about the international border running through the Lacandon forest. For the military, the forest made the border more difficult to guard. For some Lacandons the forest was a source  of  wealth  and they sold  the  hardwood  trees  to  lumber companies. The tribe began losing its traditions and self-sufficiency as their forest disappeared. Because the logging companies  supplied them with salt, Lacandons stopped burning palms.

Typical of the cultural destruction of Chiapas Mayans, the town of La Concordia and its surrounding saltworks were flooded by a dam in the 1970s and now rest on the bottom of a lake. According to Frans Blom, the Danish anthropologist who explored Mayan culture in the 1920s through the  1940s,  the  site  contained  the  unique  saltworks  of the Mayan highlands, where brine was diverted from springs by the use of tree trunks into shallow stone pans for solar evaporation, similar to the Hawaiian technique using stone bowls.

The people of La Concordia placed reeds in the evaporation pans, often shaped  into six-pointed stars. Crystals would form on the reeds, making thick, sparkling white ornaments that salt makers sold to be used as religious offerings. By Blom’s time, the Mayans were bringing these offerings to Catholic churches.

By coincidence, Cheshire salt workers had a similar tradition. At Christmastime, they placed  branches  in evaporation pans until salt crystalized  like  a  fresh  snowfall,  and they brought  these  snowy branches home for Christmas decorations.

THE ARRIVAL OF the Spanish meant not only a new power controlling the salt but a huge increase in demand  for industrial salt. The Spanish introduced herds of cattle that needed  to be fed salt and whose hides were cured with salt in a prosperous leather industry. Obsessed with the extraction of precious metals, the Spanish invented the patio process for silver mining in mid-sixteenth-century  Mexico. In this process, silver was separated  from ore  by using  salt because the sodium  in the  salt  extracted  impurities.  Silver  mining  by the  patio process required huge quantities of salt, and the Spanish built large- scale saltworks adjacent to silver mines.

The Yucatán peninsula has a climate particularly well suited for salt production and geographically is particularly well suited for trade, with its proximity to the Caribbean and Central America. It was the largest salt producer in pre-Columbian America and remained a leader when the Spanish took it over.

The Spanish, unable to locate precious metal deposits in the Yucatán, began to look  for ways of earning  state  revenue  from the Yucatán saltworks. The Spanish Crown proposed various salt taxes. But this made the salt there more expensive, and it could not compete in Cuba with British salt. Cuba, a Spanish colony, should have been a Spanish market. But a time came in the nineteenth century, with the wild  fluctuation  of  salt  prices,  when Yucatán  salt  was imported  to England through the port of Liverpool.

THE   BRITISH    FIRST arrived   in   North   America   in   the   north,   at Newfoundland, and they took cod. They next arrived in the south, the Caribbean, where they took salt, which they needed  for the cod. Only after they had a significant population of colonists in between did they think of America as a market in which to sell Liverpool salt.

To the British admiralty, the solution to a lack of sea salt was to acquire  through  war  or  diplomacy  places  that  could  produce  it. Portugal had both sea salt and an important fishing fleet, but needed protection, especially from the French who were regularly seizing their fishing boats. And so England and Portugal formed an alliance trading naval protection for sea salt.

The Portuguese alliance gained England access to the Cape Verde Islands, where British ships could  fill their holds with sea salt on their way across  the  Atlantic.  The islands  on the  eastern  side  of  the archipelago,  Maio,  Boa Vista,  and Sal,  which  means “salt,”  had marshes  with strong  brine, and in the seventeenth century Portugal granted the British exclusive use of the salt marshes of Maio and Boa Vista.

British ships had only from November until July to make salt before the summer rains ruined the brine. They usually stopped off in January, anchoring  off Maio,  which they called  May Island.  From  there  the sailors would row their launches less than 200 yards to a broad beach.

Behind the beach was a salt marsh, where a mile-long stretch of ponds would be eight inches deep in brine. It could  take months before the sailors  had scraped  enough salt  crystals  for  the  ship  to  be full.

Sometimes early rains would force them to leave. Some ships had to go to Boa Vista because  they found too many crews already working at  Maio. At Boa Vista  the  brine  was weaker  and took  longer  to crystalize and the anchorage was farther out, forcing the sailors to row a mile to bring salt to the ship.

But sea salt was valuable enough for a shipload of it to be worth the labor of an entire ship and crew for several months.

IN THE SEVENTEENTH and eighteenth centuries, while European powers were   fighting   bitterly  for  Caribbean  islands   on which  to  grow sugarcane, northern Europeans—the English, the Dutch, the Swedish, and the Danes—also looked for islands with inland salt marshes like the Cape Verde Islands.

In 1568, under William of Orange, the Dutch began an eighty-year independence struggle against Spain, which cut them off from Spanish salt. But in the Americas, the Dutch could come ashore unobserved on the  coast  of  Venezuela  at  Araya,  a hot  and desolate  eighty-mile lagoon,  and steal  Spanish  salt  from  the  beach, where Caribbean seawater evaporated into a thick white crust. The Dutch also got salt from Bonaire in the nearby Dutch Antilles.

The British gathered salt illegally from the Spanish on another small island in the area called Tortuga or Salt Tortuga, which is today part of Venezuela. They also made salt on Anguilla and the Turks Islands, which had the advantage of being closer to North America, where the cod fishery was. They would stop off in one of the salt islands, and, as in the Cape Verdes, the sailors themselves would scrape up salt and load  up their ships  and sail  on to  New England,  Nova Scotia,  or Newfoundland.

Fearing  enemy warships  and pirates,  the  salt  ships  traveled  in convoys. They also did this in Europe for the same reasons. Huge armed  fleets  of ships  of various  nationalities  would  anchor  off Le Croisic while salt was being loaded. Sailors were not allowed to be armed  when they came ashore, because if convoys  of two nations arrived at the same time, a port scuffle  could  turn into a land war.

English and Dutch sailors were especially hostile toward each other.

At  the  end of  winter, fleets of  several dozen British ships, accompanied by warships, would meet in Barbados. There they would combine  into one large  fleet and choose a commander. Then they would go to one of the salt islands, usually Tortuga, and the crews would work for months to load their ships. If the fleet was too large or if it was a wet year, there would not be enough salt to fill all the ships, and since they were only together as a temporary arrangement, they would compete, working as fast as possible, each ship trying to secure a full hold. Then they would sail north together, and when they believed they were out of danger, especially from the Spanish fleet, each would veer off on its own course.

IN  1684,  WHEN Bermuda, first explored  by the British more than 150 years earlier, finally became a British colony, the first governor was given instructions  to “proceed to rake salt.” English ships sailing to American colonies could stop off in this cluster of minuscule islands in the middle of the Atlantic some 600 miles from the coast of North America, and pick up salt for the fisheries. It was a chance  to make Bermuda productive.

But the climate in Bermuda was not warm and sunny enough for a successful sea salt operation. What Bermuda did have was cedar. So Bermudians, most of whom were originally sailors from Devon, built small, fast sloops out of cedar. Until the early eighteenth century, when New England  fishermen invented the schooner, the Bermuda  sloop with its single mast and enormous spread of sails was considered the fastest and best vessel under sail, capable of outrunning any naval ship. These sloops dominated the trade between the Caribbean and North American colonies and were even used in the Liverpool-to-West Africa trade.

In the Caribbean, the leading cargo carried to North America—more tonnage than even sugar, molasses, or rum—was salt. The leading return cargo from North America to the Caribbean was salt cod, used to feed slaves on sugar plantations.

In the southern part of the Bahamas  chain and the group south of it known as the Turks and Caicos, salt rakers found small islands with brackish lakes in the interior. Great Inagua, Turk, South Caicos, and Salt Cay (pronounced KEY) had salty inland lakes well suited for salt making. Since  Columbus  and his  Spanish successors  had already annihilated the indigenous population, these scarcely inhabited islands were easily converted into salt centers.

Great Inagua was first raked by the Spanish and Dutch. After the Spanish killed the few local tribesmen, it was an uninhabited island and sailors from various nations stopped by and filled their ships. The Spanish named it Enagua, meaning “in water.” In 1803, salt rakers from Bermuda built a small town, Matthew Town, by the edge of a salt pond at one end of the flat grassy island.

First came salt rakers, who simply scraped up what had evaporated on the edge of ponds. The crew would be dropped off on the island, where they would spend a few months or sometimes as long as a year gathering salt while the captain and three or four slaves would sail off, fishing for sea turtle, scavenging shipwrecks, and trading with pirates or  between  islands.  Sometimes   they  would   hide   in  coves  by treacherous rocks or uncharted shoals and wait, or even lure the ships onto the rocks so that they could scavenge  them.

An eighteenth-century  Bermuda  governor  complained  that  “the Caicos trade did not fail to make its devotees somewhat ferocious, for the opportunities were in picking, plundering and wrecking.” He was also  concerned  with the  practice  of sending  the slaves  plundering while the free sailors were gathering salt. The governor wrote, “The Negroes learned to be public as well as private thieves.”

When the captain and his slaves had finished  with their profitable adventures months later, they would return and pick up their crew and a full hold of salt to sell in the North American colonies.

In the 1650s, British colonists from Bermuda sailed down to Grand Turk, a small desert island, and Salt Cay, its tiny neighbor, only two miles long by one and a half miles wide. In Salt Cay, passing ships would stop to rake the ponds that occupied one third of the island. In the 1660s, Bermudians began exploiting it more systematically, at first only in the summers, which were dry.

By 1673, the arrival of Bermudian rakers on Salt Cay was a regular event. Five years later, salt raking had become equally well organized on the slightly larger island to the north, Turk or Grand Turk Island, which was named after a native cactus thought to resemble a Turkish turban. But the Spanish would come in the winter and take the salt rakers’ tools and destroy their sheds. By the early 1700s, Bermudians started living full-time on Salt Cay to protect their property. No one knows when the small harbor was built with its stone piers, but it was the most stormproof in the Turks and Caicos, a safe shelter for ships to spend a few weeks loading. But as vessels became larger, the little harbor was too shallow, and light ships had to be used to carry the salt out to mother ships anchored offshore.

Salt Cay salt makers built a system of ponds  and sluices. Every year, they had to spend weeks overhauling the system. The ponds had to be drained in order to mend the stone or clay bottoms so that they would hold water and not crumble into the salt. Then the ponds would be refilled for the slow process of solar evaporation.

Salt makers came from Bermuda and built large stone houses  in the Bermudan style with thick walls to hold up a cut stone roof built in steps like a pyramid.  The heavy roof was designed  to resist  hurricanes.

Mahogany  furniture was brought to the island. These were the manor houses of slave plantations, but they had none of the elegance of the Virginia tobacco, or Alabama cotton, or West Indian sugar planters’ homes.

The salt makers’ house had an eastern porch that looked out over his salt ponds and a western porch that looked over his loading docks. The houses were always built at the water’s edge by a loading dock. The salt,  too  valuable  to  entrust  to  anyone else,  was kept  in the basement, which was one story below ground, but the windowless first story of the house had no floor, so that actually each house had a two-story storage bin at its base. Salt was the salt makers’ wealth, and they watched over it day and night.

Windmills pumped the seawater through successive ponds, and the mills and sluices were maintained by a blacksmith shop at the house.

Slaves grew some vegetables in gardens, but the soil became poorer and poorer as the trees were all chopped down to fuel salt pans. The island was hot and dry and naked, and food and even fresh water were becoming increasingly scarce.

In 1790, a man named Stubbs  who had left the  North American colonies because he remained loyal to British rule, sent for his brother, Thomas Stubbs, and settled in Providenciales, an island in the Turks and Caicos. The Stubbs family were salt producers in Cheshire, but Thomas and his  brother wanted  to start a new life as West Indian planters. They called their plantation Cheshire Hall and tried to grow sisal, a hemp substitute from the fibers of the agave plant. But sisal growing at Cheshire Hall was a failure. Then they tried to grow sea island  cotton,  but that failed  also.  On these  flat,  arid  little  islands, everything failed except salt. Salt makers brought in livestock: donkeys to haul carts of salt to the wharves, and cattle to feed themselves as they made salt.

All that these small, salt-making islands had was their location in shipping lanes, sunshine, and marshes that trapped seawater. Yet for a time they prospered because the British Empire needed salt.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Salt and Independence

THE ENGLISH, THE Dutch, and the French hunted for salt, the magic elixir that could turn their new American seas of limitless fish into limitless wealth. The Dutch gave incentives to colonists and, in 1660, granted a colonist  the  right to  build  saltworks  on a small  island  near  New Amsterdam,  known as Coney Island.  The French learned  from the indigenous people the location of licks, springs, and marshes. They used many existing saltworks, including those at Onondaga, New York, and Shawneetown, Illinois.

In 1614, Captain John Smith had explored by sea the coast of New England from Penobscot Bay to Cape Cod. Smith, one of the 105 original  settlers  of Jamestown  and a leading  force  in the  English settlement  of  North America,  had also  charted  Virginia  and the Chesapeake Bay. He did this work, both in Virginia and New England, with  the   intention  of  enticing   settlers,  noting  the  prospects  for enrichment  from fish, salt, fruit, precious metals, furs, and even the possibility of producing silk.

Although known for a swaggering boastful nature, Smith described the  riches  of these  new lands  with notable  restraint.  By the  early seventeenth century,  a considerable  literature on the  wealth of the Americas had already accumulated, and most of it was outrageously exaggerated to the point where, Smith observed, settlers would quickly leave in disappointment. And so he resolved to be a realist, though his trademark style could be seen in naming Cape Ann after a woman he had been fond of during his military service in Turkey. Back in England, it was renamed Cape Ann after Prince Charles’s mother.

Although personally disliking fishing, Smith understood that if it was a profitable endeavor, it would attract settlers. “Herring, cod, and ling is that triplicitie that makes  their wealth and shippings multiplicities such as it is,” he wrote in his unmusical prose and devoted several pages in hi s Description  of  New England to  describing  the  wealth  various nations had garnered from these fish. He demonstrated his point with characteristic flair, by ordering his crew to fish and salt cod while he was exploring coastlines, then earning a modest—but widely reported —fortune selling the salt cod in England and Spain.

Smith also  understood  the importance  of salt to his  dream  of a British America. He had established saltworks in Jamestown in 1607. As he sailed the rocky coastline of New England, he noted places that seemed suitable harbors, but also locations that seemed  favorable for salt making. He thought conditions were suitable for “white on white,” reevaporating sea salt the way the English improved French bay salt.

He thought  that Plum  Island,  just  north of  Cape Ann, would  be a particularly good site for a saltworks. In his list of twenty-five “excellent good harbors” for fishing, he completely ignored the best harbor on Cape Ann, which only nine  years  later  would  become the  fishing station  of Gloucester  and eventually  the  leading  cod port of  New England.

Smith’s Description of New England was an important factor in the Pilgrims’ decision to go to New England, and when they arrived, they found Smith’s portrait to be accurate. They were, as promised, in a land of cod where salt could be made. 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. In 1630,  the  Reverend   Francis  Higgenson  wrote   in New England Plantation, “There is probabilitie that the Countrey is of an excellent temper for the making  of salt.” But the Pilgrims had no idea how to make it, and for that matter, they didn’t know how to catch fish either.

Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony sent to England for advisers on fishing, salt making, and ship building. Within a few years the colony began to thrive on fishing. But it was still limited by salt supply. The salt adviser tried to make bay salt in the French manner, digging evaporation ponds lined with clay. But New England weather was ill suited to this technique. According to Bradford, the salt maker was “an ignorant, foolish, self-willed fellow.”

Massachusetts,  like  Queen Elizabeth,  encouraged  salt  making through the granting of monopolies to those who showed  the skill to produce salt cheaply. The colony granted Samuel Winslow a ten-year monopoly to employ his ideas on salt producing, which is considered the first patent issued in America. The same year, John Jenny was given exclusive salt-making rights in Plymouth  for twenty-one  years.

Saltworks were started in Salem, Salisbury, and Gloucester. Salt was needed  not only for fish exports but also for furs. The settlers traded with the native Americans for  bear, beaver, moose, and otter pelts, for which there  was a lucrative  European  market.  Because furs  were salted, they were frequently exported on the same ships as cod. But to get the indigenous people to produce more furs, the British had to supply them with more salt.

The New England household also needed a great deal of salt for domestic  purposes.  The typical colonial  New England  house—the New England saltbox—got its name from being shaped  like the salt containers that were in every home. New Englanders slaughtered their meat in the fall and salted it. They ate New England boiled dinner, which was either salt cod or salt beef with cabbage  and turnips. They also  ate  a great deal of salted  herring, though they seem to have preferred lightly salted and smoked red herring, perhaps because of their limited salt supply. When these 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 red herring, meaning “a false trail.”

Wealthy Virginians imported enormous amounts of English salt beef in spite of raising their own cattle. They regarded the British beef as better  cured,  perhaps  because the  British had ample  salt.  But Virginians  made some salt  of  their own and imported more  from England. They built a cottage industry of salted pork fat, and by the time  of the American Revolution,  Virginia  hams were  famous and exported not only to other colonies from New York to Jamaica, but even to England.

During the Revolution, when  it was a part of the provisions of the Continental army, Virginia ham earned the admiration of the French, which is always considered high praise for a ham. In 1781, the Comte de Rochambeau, a French hero of the American Revolution and later tyrant  of  the  Haitian  Revolution,  while  engaged in  the  Virginia campaign said that French ham “cannot be compared to the quality and taste of theirs.”

FOR A WHILE, the American colonists pursued their own salt making with characteristic  self-reliance,  producing  a significant amount.  But  the securing  of  these  colonies  by the  British  had coincided  with  the discovery of rock salt in Cheshire and its increased production. In time, the British made Liverpool salt cheaper and more accessible  than local salt, and domestic American production dropped off. This was exactly the way colonialism was supposed to work.

While relations were intact with England, the colonists had enough salt for their domestic needs, but the salt supply was inhibiting their foreign trade. Of course, they were not supposed  to be engaging in foreign trade. They were supposed  to buy everything from England and sell everything to England. But the American colonists produced more, especially more salt cod, than the British could sell. As long as the Americans  were  making  their products  with British salt,  the British were happy to let them overproduce.

But the British often failed to supply enough salt for American needs. In 1688, Daniel Coxe wrote about New Jersey that fish were abundant but the colony was unable to establish a successful fishery because  of a “want of salt.” The New Jersey colony sent to France for experts —“diverse Frenchmen skillful in making salt by the sun.” This was not how colonialism was supposed to work.

The American colonies, especially the two most productive, Virginia and Massachusetts,  became accustomed  to  selling  their products around the Atlantic world. New England began by selling salted cod and salted furs but soon was selling manufactured goods, buying iron and Mediterranean products in the Basque port of Bilbao, selling cod for slaves in West Africa, slaves for molasses in the Caribbean, rum made from molasses in West Africa.

By the early 1700s, Boston merchants did not feel that they needed England anymore. In one important respect, they were wrong. Despite increasingly independent and sophisticated trans-Atlantic commerce, they still depended on England for salt. New Englanders occasionally imported salt from other countries. Ships selling cod to Bilbao would pick up salt from southern Spain at Cadiz or Portuguese salt at Lisbon.

But in 1775, like exemplary British colonists, the Americans were still relying on British salt—either Cheshire salt from Liverpool or sea salt from the British colonies, especially Great Inagua, Turk Island, and Salt Cay.

Tom Paine’s contention that a continent obviously could not be ruled by an island was increasingly resonating among the merchant class. In 1759,  the  British,  sensing  that  American  trade  was leading  to American independence, started imposing punitive tariffs, taxes, and other measures designed to inhibit American trade. The Americans responded  angrily,  and the  British  responded  with  even harsher measures. In 1775, the atmosphere was so embittered that the British thought  it necessary to place 3,000 troops in rebellious Boston under Major  General  Thomas Gage.  When these  soldiers  attempted  to spread out into the countryside, Americans went into armed rebellion, firing on the British troops at Concord and Lexington on April 19. The Continental Congress, first called in 1774 as a protest, reconvened in May 1775 to prepare for war.

In June, while the Congress was still meeting, the rebels marched on Boston and Gage committed  all but 500 of his troops to a battle on Breed’s Hill above Boston Harbor. Although the British objective of holding Boston was accomplished, Gage lost more than 40 percent of his  soldiers  in this  engagement.  Incorrectly known as the Battle  of Bunker Hill, this was to be the worst British loss of the war.

In the summer of 1775, the British declared the colonies in open rebellion and responded with a naval blockade, causing an immediate and serious salt shortage, not only for the fisheries but for the soldiers, horses,  and medical  supplies  of George  Washington’s  Continental army. In addition to the blockade, British ground forces isolated the mid-Atlantic colonies from their two sources of American salt: New England  and the  South.  They even attacked  and destroyed  mid-Atlantic saltworks.

AFTER THE BUNKER Hill debacle, Gage was replaced as commander of British forces  in America  by General William Howe, an illegitimate relative of the royal family. In 1758, Howe had been elected a Member of  Parliament and had opposed measures  against American commerce, fearing British policy would lead to a loss of the colonies. Now he was ordered to hold them by force. In August 1776, he took Long Island  and then  New York  City.  The next  year,  he drove Washington from Philadelphia. At this point in the war, he had successfully cut off Washington’s army from its coastal salt supply and even captured  Washington’s  salt  reserves,  despite  the  American general’s desperate dispatch warning, “Every attempt must be made to save it.”

The American colonists initially responded to the British blockade by boiling sea water. But boiling used up an enormous quantity of wood to make a very small amount of salt. About 400 gallons of seawater were needed to make one bushel of salt. In the winter, families would keep an iron caldron of seawater cooking over the household fire, which was not a great additional expense, since the fire was burning continuously anyway  to  heat  the  house. But  only  a small  amount  of  salt  was produced this way. Salt makers drove wooden stakes into tidal pools, and salt would crystalize on the wood as the pools evaporated. This technique was inexpensive but also yielded little.

The Continental Congress  passed several  measures  addressing the salt shortage. On December 29, 1775, the Congress “earnestly recommended to the several Assemblies and Conventions to promote by sufficient  public  encouragement  the  making   of  salt  in  their respective colonies.”

In March 1776, Pennsylvania Magazine published a lengthy excerpt from Brownrigg’s essay on making bay salt. The article was reprinted as a pamphlet and circulated by the Congress. On May 28, 1776, the Congress decided to give a bounty of one third of a dollar per bushel, which weighs about fifty pounds, to all salt importers or manufacturers in the colonies for the next year. The moment the pamphlet and bounty offer  were  published,  salt-works  were  started  along  the American coastline. New Jersey had contemplated establishing a state-operated saltworks, but so many private ones were built along its coast in 1777 that it canceled these plans as unnecessary.

In June 1777, a congressional committee was appointed “to devise ways and means of supplying the United States with salt.” Ten days later the committee  proposed that each colony could offer financial incentives  to  both  importers  and producers  of  salt.  Some of  the thirteen colonies had already been doing this. New Jersey declared that any saltwork could  exempt  up to ten employees  from military service.

ONE OF THE many sea salt operations to start up in response to the government’s publication of the Brownrigg pamphlet and bounty offer was  the   first   saltworks   on  Cape  Cod.  Given  the   cod-fishing communities and the presence of sea and wind, Cape Cod was a logical place  to make salt. The water both on the bay side  and in Nantucket Sound is even saltier than that of the open Atlantic.

The first works was started in the town of Dennis by John Sears, who spent his days so lost in thought that he was known as “Sleepy John Sears.”  The neighbors  were  skeptical  of  the  10-by-100-foot wooden vat Sleepy John built in Sesuit Harbor. The vat leaked, and after many weeks he had produced only eight bushels of salt.

The neighbors  laughed,  but Sleepy John Sears  spent  the winter caulking the vat as a ship’s hull would  be sealed. In the summer of 1777, a time of great salt scarcity, he produced thirty bushels of salt and his neighbors stopped laughing, and Sleepy John became known as Salty John Sears.

The following year, the British man-of-war the Somerset ran aground trying to  round  the  Cape. The coastline  was poorly marked,  and scavenging shipwrecks was a strong local tradition. Sears took the Somerset’s bilge pump to fill his vats. But even with the bilge pump, producing Sears’s salt required a great deal of heavy manual labor, and only wartime prices made this high-cost salt economically viable.

Then a man named Nathaniel  Freeman,  from  nearby  Harwich, suggested  that Sears  use windmills to pump  seawater.  The same thing had been done in eighth-century  Sicily, in Trapani, but Cape Codders  thought  this  was a brilliant  new idea.  Soon the  wooden skeletons of rustic windmills were seen on the edges of most Cape Cod towns.  The windmills,  known  as saltmills,  pumped seawater through  pipes—lead-lined  hollowed  pine  logs—to  the  evaporation pans. But in a climate where solar evaporation was viable only in the summer  months,  the  hardship   of  wartime  made this  operation profitable. And still these rebel colonies could not produce enough salt to meet their needs.

Fishermen with catches  to be salted  and farmers  with pigs  and cattle to slaughter and salt before winter hoped for a short war, but that was not  to  be. By the  time  it ended with the  Treaty  of  Paris  in September 1783, the American Revolution would be, until Vietnam, the longest war ever fought by the United States. A new nation was born with the bitter memory of what it meant to depend on others for salt.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Liberté, Egalité, Tax Breaks

IN 1875, A prominent German botanist named Matthais Jakob Schleiden wrote  a  book, Das   Salz, which  contended  that  there  was  a  direct correlation between salt taxes and despots. He pointed out that neither ancient Athens nor Rome, while it remained a republic, taxed salt, but listed Mexico and China among the salt-taxing tyrannies of his day. It seems  uncertain  if  salt  taxes  are  always  an accurate  litmus  test  for democracy, but the French salt tax, the gabelle, clearly demonstrated what was wrong with the French monarchy.

The argument for the gabelle had been that since everyone, rich and poor, used salt more or less equally, a tax on salt would be in effect a poll tax, an equal tax per person. Throughout history, poll taxes, charging  the  same  to  the  poorest  peasant  as  the  richest  aristocrat, have been the most hated. The gabelle was not an exception. The tax performed  the  peculiar  service  of  making  a  very  common product seem rare because  the complex rules of taxation inhibited trade. And even more infuriating, the gabelle made a basic product expensive, for the profit of the Crown.

Even the  Crown’s  claim that the  gabelle  was fair because  it taxed everyone  equally was not true. There  were  many arbitrary provisions, such as the exemptions for the town of Collioure; for some, but not all religious  institutions; some officers; some magistrates; some people of note.

The gabelle, like France, was established piecemeal. The first attempt at a comprehensive salt administration occurred in the Berre saltworks  near  Marseilles  in 1259, by Saint  Louis’s  brother,  Comte Charles  de Provence.  The following  century,  this  administration  was extended  to  Peccais,  Aigues-Mortes,  and the  Camargue—an  area that  became  known administratively  as  Pays  de  Petite  Gabelle.  In 1341, Philip  VI established  a  salt  administration  in northern  France that was labeled the Pays  de Grande Gabelle. At the time, these two areas included most of the territory controlled by the French Crown.

At first the gabelle imposed a modest 1.66 percent sales tax on salt. But each monarch eventually found himself in a crisis—a prince to be ransomed, a war to be declared—that was resolved by an increase in the  salt  tax.  By 1660, King  Louis  XIV  regarded  the  gabelle  as  a leading source of state revenues.

One of the gabelle’s most irritating inventions was the sel du devoir, the salt duty. Every person in the Grande Gabelle over the age of eight was required to purchase seven kilograms (15.4 pounds) of salt each year  at  a  fixed  high  government  price.  This  was  far  more  salt  than could possibly be used, unless it was for making salt fish, sausages, hams, and other salt-cured goods. But using the sel du devoir to make salted  products  was  illegal,  and, if  caught,  the  perpetrator  would  be charged  with  the  crime  of fa u x saunage, salt  fraud,  which  carried severe penalties. Many simple acts were grounds for a charge of faux saunage.  In the  Camargue,  shepherds  who let  their  flocks  drink  the salty pond water could be charged with avoiding the gabelle.

A 1670 revision of the criminal code found yet another use for salt 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. Nor could the accused  escape their day in court by dying in the often miserable conditions of the prisons. They too  would  be salted  and put on trial. Breton historians have discovered that in 1784 in the town of Cornouaille, Maurice LeCorre had died in prison and was ordered salted for trial. But due to some bureaucratic error, the  corpse  did  not get a trial date  and was found  by a prison guard  more  than seven years  later, not only salted but fermented in beer, at which point it was buried without trial.

LOUIS XIV PUT the state’s finance and commerce in the hands of Jean- Baptiste  Colbert, the  son of a merchant family from the  Champagne region. Colbert was a leading advocate of the school of economics known as  mercantilism,  which  held  that  the  value  of  the  state  was measured   in   the   goods   it   exported   and  the   precious   metals   it imported. To this end, both production and trade were to be tightly controlled by the state through such tools as taxes and tariffs. Mercantilism held that the sum total of world trade was limited, so that if England  increased  its  trade, it  would  be at the  expense  of France and everyone else.

In salt, Colbert reasoned, France had a valuable export product. He was directly involved in marketing French salt to the Nordic countries, and he made important improvements  in French waterways  to  move salt  more  efficiently.  He believed  that  France  made the  world’s  best salt, which is not a surprising point of view for a Frenchman, but many Englishmen, Dutch, and Germans of the time agreed. Colbert corresponded with salt makers about technical improvements. Today, in Guérande it is proudly asserted that Louis XIV would only eat Guérande salt. If this is true, it would explain why he was so interested in improving the color. Colbert pointed out that if it were white like the salt of France’s primary salt competitors, Spain and Portugal, it would sell better. But the paludiers of Guérande continued to rake up salt with green algae  and the  charcoal-colored  clay mud on which the  ponds were built.

Colbert’s  name became  infamous  in  French  salt  history  when, in 1680, he revised the gabelle, codifying the inequities among regions into  six unequal  zones. The Pays  de Grand  Gabelle  was  the  oldest part, the heart of France, including the Paris region. With only one third of the  French population, who used only a quarter of the  French salt, and yet who paid two-thirds of the state’s salt revenue, the residents of this  region  were  the  angriest  people  in  France.  Local  merchants imported inexpensive salt from  Portugal, the white salt of Setúbal, to try to lower the local price.

The Pays  de Petite Gabelle, on the Mediterranean, where much of the   salt   production   was   owned  by  the   Crown,   was   less   rigidly controlled  but  also  so  heavily  taxed  that  one  fourth  of  all  salt  tax revenue was squeezed from this fifth of the population.

In the third region, the Pays de Salines, which included Lorraine and other areas  of inland  brine  wells, the  Crown also  owned much of the production. But in  this region, unlike the Grande and Petite Gabelles, both wholesale and retail sales were carried out by private merchants rather than agents of the state. Hence, far less political tension existed in this region, but far less revenue was earned by the Crown. People in the  Pays  de Salines  consumed twice  as  much salt  as  those  in the Grande  Gabelle. Adam Smith  would  no doubt  have argued  that  the relative  free  trade  of the  Pays  de Salines  increased  sales, though it could also be argued that the northern French did not traditionally eat as much salted food as in eastern France with its ham, sausage,  and choucroute.

In southwestern  France,  François  I,  the  sixteenth-century  monarch who kept his table salt in a Cellini, dropped the small but irritating consumer  tax  and replaced  it  with  a  much larger  tax  on producers. After a year of angry protest, he cut this tax in half, and a year later, in 1543, the tax was entirely dropped. Instead, the rigid administration of the Grande Gabelle, with its controls on production, wholesale operations, and retail sales, was to be extended to this region. The result was a movement of some 40,000 farmers, who rose up in armed rebellion with the slogan “Vive le roi sans gabelle”—Long live the king without the gabelle. The French Crown, shocked by the size and ferocity of the  uprising, backed down, thankful that at least they were still saying “Vive le roi.”

It was decided that in this troubled region, known to the gabelle as Pays Redimées, it would be prudent for the Crown to content itself with only the revenue from tolls on the transport of salt. When Colbert codified the gabelle, he kept this southwestern Pays Redimées with its exemptions, which meant that while the north endured severe salt controls, and the east and the Mediterranean also had some, untaxed southwestern salt could be traded across the region’s southern border into Spain at competitive prices. Worse, the Basque provinces, which were right on the Spanish border, as a condition of their participation in France, were exempted from the gabelle, leaving the Basques in an ideal position to trade inexpensive salt in both countries.

Added to the gabelle’s complicated multitiered system was yet another privileged border region, a small area on the English Channel where   salt  makers   boiled   seawater  with  the   ashes   of  seaweed, making a fine, white salt similar to peat salt. The Crown had pleased this  region with only light salt taxes, but then realizing  that such high- quality inexpensive salt could easily flood the neighboring Grande Gabelle, restricted the amount of salt produced by limiting the number of saltworks.

To the  rest  of France,  the  most  irritatingly unequal region was the Pays  Exempt,  made up of Brittany and newly acquired  areas  in the north such as Flanders, which had been brought into France  with the promise that they would not have to participate in the gabelle. These were also fishing regions, like Collioure, and Colbert wanted fishing areas to be exempt from the salt tax. He had a great belief in the value not only of salt fish as an export but of fishermen as a potential navy. The Pays Exempt also included the entire salt-producing coast from Guérande to the salt-making islands off La Rochelle. In the mid– eighteenth century, salt provided work for 950 families in the Guérande region  alone.  About  500 men were  paludiers,  working  32,000 salt ponds. More than 3,000 ponds had been added since  the  sixteenth century. The gabelle had made paludiers an agricultural elite, earning a better living than most peasants of the time. Some even owned small parts of their saltworks.

Brittany,  like  Basque   country,  was  a  border  region  with  cheap untaxed salt to trade, in this case  across the Channel to England and up the coast to Holland.  In the seventeenth century, so many English, Welsh, Scottish, and Dutch ships  put into  Le Croisic  for salt that the local Catholic church worried about a Protestant influence on the townspeople.

IN  1784, THE French  government  turned  to  Jacques  Necker,  a  Swiss banker  so  brilliant  in  his  administration  of  the   disastrous  French economy that for a moment it appeared he would save the monarchy. In   1784,  he  reported   that   a m i n o t of   salt,   which  was  forty-nine kilograms  (107.8 pounds), cost  only  31 sous  in  Brittany,  but  81 in Poitou, 591 in Anjou,  and 611 in Berry. Necker  recognized  that with such price differences, France was rich in opportunities for smugglers. Salt  smugglers   and  clandestine   salt  makers,  the faux-sauniers, were  simply opportunists  amassing  illegal  fortunes  underselling legal salt.   Yet,   they   became   popular   heroes   who  could   wander   the countryside helping themselves to farm products without ever hearing a  complaint  from  a  peasant.  Colbert’s  1680 revision  of the  gabelle made it a crime for an innkeeper to give a room to a salt smuggler. A repeat offender could be sentenced to death.

The gabelous, the  hated  collectors  and enforcers  of  the  gabelle, were often crude and lawless men, abusive of their special privileges, which included carrying arms and stopping, questioning, searching, or arresting people at will. The gabelous were especially distrustful of women and abusive to them, sometimes squeezing a choice part for the pleasure of it. Often, to their disappointment, they would find bags of  salt  in  these  places.  Women hid  salt  in  their  breasts,  corsets, posteriors—places where they hoped not to be squeezed. Sometimes entire faux  culs, false rears, would be constructed for hiding salt in a dress.

Something   close   to   a   state   of   permanent   warfare   developed between salt smugglers and the gabelous. Gabelous would be murdered, and the Crown would respond by having royal troops sack the  village  where  the  crime  took  place.  On September  8, 1710, the gabelous went heavily armed into the woods near Avignon to intercept salt smugglers, and forty or fifty salt traders opened fire on them. The area  was  in open rebellion.  Similar  rebellions  were  breaking  out  all over France.

The most important smuggling border in France was the Loire River, which marked the line between the Pays Exempt and the Pays de Grande  Gabelle,  between Brittany and Anjou, regions  where  Necker had found the price of salt to be 31 sous and 591 sous, respectively. In 1698, a government official reported that “salt smuggling is endless on the Loire.” Normally impoverished peasants living along the river could earn comfortable incomes from moving salt. The legendary smugglers had colorful pseudonyms, such as François Gantier a.k.a. Pot au Lait, milk pitcher. Because  local fishermen, who knew all the hidden islands and coves of the river, would carry salt, the Crown declared it illegal to fish at night. By 1773, the  gabelle  had 3,000 troops stationed  on the Loire to stop salt smuggling.

Some ruses  were  complicated. Salt cod that landed  at Le Croisic was moved up the Loire for sale in France. Some of the cod had been salted  and dried  on land,  but  another  product,  known as  green  salt cod, not because  of its  color but because  it was closer to  its  natural state, was made on board ship, where it was only salted but not dried. This was a more delicate cure and required ample salt to prevent spoilage while in transit. But at times, it seemed to inspectors, the fish was considerably oversalted. Cod would be shipped in thick layers of salt.  Salt  inspectors  on the  Loire  would  examine  the  cod shipments from  Le Croisic  entering  the  Pays  de Grande  Gabelle,  fish by fish, shaking off the excess  salt, making note of how much salt fell off of how many fish.  If  too  much salt  fell  off,  it  would  be  reported.  However, merchants found that their journey could be expedited by the gift of a few salt cod to the right official.

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. The salt law in France, as would later happen  in India, was not the singular cause of revolution, but it became a symbol for all the injustices of government.

In 1789, the French revolted, declaring the establishment of a National Assembly. When King Louis XVI tried to send troops against this   revolutionary  legislature,  a  mob  attacked   the   Bastille and  an armed revolution began. That same year, the revolutionary legislature repealed the gabelle. Some in the Assembly had argued for a low salt tax universally applied. But in the  end the Assembly voted  for no salt tax at all, not even bothering to replace this mainstay of state revenues with another source of income.

On March 22, 1790, the National Assembly, calling the salt tax “odious,” annulled all trials for violation of the gabelle and ordered all those charged, on trial, or convicted to be set free.

Louis, accused  of conspiring with Austrians and Prussians to overthrow  the  revolution,  was  beheaded.  His  wife,  Marie  Antoinette, who loved choucroute, was also beheaded, as were many of the Swiss soldiers of the Garde Royale. They also had acquired the court taste for  choucroute  and numerous  inns  had  sprung  up near  the  Palais Royal, where they had spent their meal breaks, feasting on choucroute with sausages and salted  meats. The tradition of restaurants  serving midday choucroute in that part of Paris continues to this day.

IN      1804, NAPOL ÉON Bonaparte,   who  had   risen   to   head   of   the revolutionary army and then rose  to  first  consul,  became  emperor  of the French. He reinstated the gabelle but without an exemption for Brittany.

Their salt no longer having a competitive advantage, the paludiers, instead  of being  slightly better  off than the  average  French peasant, were  now among the  poorest.  They continued  to  wear  large,  floppy, three-cornered   hats   in   the   style   of   eighteenth-century   peasants. Visitors  found  this  a picturesque  part of Brittany. Novelist Honoré de Balzac  abandoned poetic  restraint in his  description of the  paludiers and their treeless salt marsh, writing that they had “the grace of a bouquet  of  violets”  and  asserting  that  it “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. Faced with an onslaught of affluent French who found them exotic, the paludiers made souvenirs: ceramic plates depicting their dress and dolls in paludier costume fashioned out of seashells. Le Bourg de Batz became  Batz-sur-Mer, Batz-by-the-sea, to  make this  salt town by the swamp sound more suitable for tourism.

The salt cuisine of Brittany showed its poverty. Breton cooking was based on the few simple crops that paludiers could grow in their clay- bound soil, mostly potatoes and onions, which absorbed a salty taste from  the  seaweed  in the  soil. Ragoût  de berniques, literally  a  stew made of nothing, was in fact made of potatoes, carrots, and onions. While  France  was  one of  the  last  European  nations  to  accept  the eating of potatoes, Brittany was one of the first potato-eating parts of France. Almost forty years earlier Antoine-Augustin Parmentier had persuaded  the  royal family to  promote  the  eating  of potatoes, a man named Blanchet launched a potato-eating campaign in Brittany. Soon after  that,  a cleric  named de la  Marche  distributed  potatoes  to  poor parishioners   and  was   nicknamed d’eskop   ar   patatez, the   potato bishop. After the Revolution, paludiers supplemented their diminished income by growing potatoes, which were boiled in brine that left a fine salt powder on the skin—patate cuit au sel.

A Breton expression was “Kement a zo fall, a gar ar sall”— Everything that is not good asks to be salted. Everything from meat to butter  to  potatoes  was salted.  Salt  was Brittany’s  cheapest  product, the one everyone could afford. Another Breton proverb was “Aviz hag holen a roer d’an nep a c’houlenn”—Advice  and salt are  available  to anyone who wants it.

Kig-sall, salted pig, usually was made with the ears, tail, and feet— sometimes  better cuts  if they could  be afforded—put in a barrel with lard and salt, and kept two  or three  months  until preserved  like  ham. And there  was oing, known in Breton  as bloneg, which  was  nothing more than pork fat rendered with salt and pepper, dried in the open air on paper, and then smoked in a fireplace. A slice of oing was added to a vegetable soup as a substitute for meat.

IN  THE 1870S,  when the  area  was  connected  to  the  national  railway system, the floppy, three-cornered hats vanished. The same railroad system  favored  eastern  France,  where  the  new industries  such as steel were, and made the  salt of Lorraine  more  accessible  than sea salt. The gabelle remained a part of French administration until  it was finally abolished in the newly liberated France of 1946.

Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, the Comte de Mirabeau, the man who had defied Louis XVI by opening the National Assembly, said, “In the final analysis, the people will judge the revolution by this fact alone—does it take more or less money? Are they better off? Do they have more work? And is that work better paid?”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Preserving Independence

TREATIES ARE USUALLY imperfect solutions, and the Treaty of Paris did not end all hostilities between the new United States and Britain. The United States  was embargoed  from any British goods, and British colonies were not permitted to engage  in U.S. trade. The Turk Islands, the present-day Turks and Caicos, including Salt Cay, became havens for Americans still loyal to Britain. In Cape Cod the price of salt rose from fifty cents a bushel to eight dollars.

In 1793, in a postwar economy that was still demanding salt, another Sears, Reuben Sears, a Cape Cod carpenter, invented a roof that slid open and shut on oak rollers,  allowing  sea salt  to  now be made efficiently from March until November. The vats were exposed while the sun was shining, but after sunset and whenever it began  to rain the roofs were rolled over the vats. Though the saltworks were privately owned, the Cape Cod communities considered them so essential to the general well-being that when clouds began to darken the daytime sky, men and women  would run out to roll all the roofs  closed and children would be sent from the schools  to help, and the coastline would rumble like nearby thunder from the sound of hundreds of oak wheels.

The small-scale Yankee entrepreneur, for whom New England was famous, found an opportunity in salt. By 1800, a small initial investment in a Cape Cod saltworks  would quickly yield returns of 30 percent. Most of the stretches of virgin sand beach and upland dunes, land considered useless until then, were becoming marred with windmills, pipes, and huge vats with rolling roofs. The prices were high, and the market seemed endless. Whatever  salt was not used by local fishermen was shipped to Boston or New York. As long as the profits were copious and easy, Cape Codders cared no more about their spoiled  dunes than  did  the people  in  Cheshire  worry  about  their blackened skies.

On Cape Cod they talked  of “the  lazy man’s  gold mine,”  and it seemed everybody wanted to get into salt making. The glassworks in Sandwich, famous  in the nineteenth century for their little glass saltcellars, needed intense heat for glassmaking. The cooling fires still gave off enough heat to evaporate sea-water, and salt became a by- product of their glassmaking.

With an increased salt supply, the fishing industry grew.

THE AMERICANS  DID not forget the  salt  shortages  of the  Revolution.

Several  states,  including  Massachusetts,  still  paid  bounties  to  salt producers.  The new nation  remained,  in  principle,  determined  to encourage salt production. In practice, this was not always the case.

When the new government realized  that there  was an unregulated commerce  in whiskey  in western  Pennsylvania,  traded  across  the Allegheny for salt, it responded by taxing the whiskey in order to stop the  trade.  In  1791,  the  whiskey-producing  farmers  rebelled,  and beloved  President Washington shocked the public by calling  out a militia to put down what has become  known as the Whiskey Rebellion.

In 1787, the new Americans  began producing salt in Onondaga, New York. Jesuit missionaries who had been with the Onondaga tribe in the  seventeenth century,  first  told Europeans  of the  salt  springs there. One French missionary, Father Simon Le Moyne, wrote in his diary: “We tasted a spring which the Indians dared not drink. They say it is inhabited by a demon who makes it fetid. I found  it was a salt spring. In fact, we made salt as good as sea salt and carried a quantity of it to Quebec.”

The Onondaga are an Iroquois-speaking tribe, hosts to the annual meeting of the Iroquois. Like some, but not all, of the Iroquois groups, they had sided with the British during the Revolution. In 1788, New York  State  negotiated  a treaty  with the  Onondaga establishing  a 10,000-acre reservation with joint ownership. But in 1795, the treaty was renegotiated, and the Onondaga, a people that traditionally had not even used salt, gave up their rights to the land in exchange  for the annual delivery to the Onondaga  nation of 150 bushels of salt. In 1787, when the whites began producing salt there, it had been at a rate of only ten bushels a day.

The state is still delivering its annual salt payments, though some Onondaga now feel that they would rather have the land returned. The payments amount to a truckload of five-pound bags, which the state buys for  the  best  price   it  can find—usually between  $1,000  and $2,000, which is not a huge increase from the $900 that 150 bushels of salt cost at the time. Today the Onondaga use much of their salt for preserving  deer  and other  game and making  a  great  deal  of sauerkraut,  neither  of  which  was a  tradition  before  contact  with Europeans.  According  to  Audrey  Shenandoah, a  member  of  the Onondaga: “We make a lot of sauerkraut, that is, since the contact. We grow  a  lot  of  garden  vegetables.  A lot  of  cabbage and make sauerkraut. But we didn’t use salt for much but medicine before the contact.” Salt is still used by the Onondaga  to draw out the infection from an insect bite or the prick of a thorn.

In 1797, the state of New York began granting leases for working the brine springs of Onondaga. The state fixed a maximum price of sixty cents per bushel with a four-cents-per-bushel tax. That year, production at the springs, centered in the town of Salina, was 25,500 bushels, but by 1810, Onondaga and Cayuga Counties were producing about 3 million bushels annually, using both solar and wood-fired evaporation.

The brine springs had become the most important saltworks in the new United States.

THE FEELING WAS strong in the United States that the British were not to be trusted. They had never withdrawn as promised from U.S. territory along the Great Lakes, they encouraged the hostility toward the United States of native Americans, including the Onondaga and Cayuga, and they refused any agreement that would be in any way helpful to the U.S. economy. John Jay’s 1795 treaty with Britain, which opened trade but on terms  more  favorable  to  England  than the  United  States,  was unpopular.

The British claimed  the  right to force  into their own service  any British sailor serving on a U.S. ship and boarded American merchant vessels in search of them. They frequently also took American sailors. In 1807, a British warship fired on the American frigate Chesapeake. President  Thomas Jefferson  responded  with  the   Embargo  Act, banning U.S. ships from foreign trade. This act was aimed at both the British and the French because both boarded American merchant vessels. Not only did the trade ban fail to change European policy, but

it  was an economic  disaster  for New England.  The embargo  was dropped, but there were calls for a retaliatory invasion of the remaining British colonies in North America, present-day Canada.

In a young country in which the North and South were increasingly at odds with  each other,  the  cry  for  such radical  measures  against Canada  usually   came  from   Southerners.   New  Yorkers   simply complained that Canada  was able to attract the larger share of upstate commerce because it had better commercial waterways. In  1808,  a  resolution  recommending  consideration  of  a  canal connecting the Great Lakes to the Hudson River was introduced in the New York Assembly by Joshua Forman, from the salt-producing town of Salina. Forman believed that the canal was the necessary key to expanding the salt industry. It would offer the Onondaga  salt region an inexpensive route for bulk shipment to New York City. From there, the world would be their market.

Despite   considerable   opposition   to  the   proposal,  $600   was appropriated  to survey a possible route. Politicians and financiers in New York were distrustful of the project, fearing it would undermine  the importance  of the port of New York. The exception was the former mayor of New York City and current governor, De Witt Clinton. The leading advocate of the canal, Governor Clinton was from one of the most prominent New York families. His  father, James, had been a Revolutionary  War  hero,  and his  uncle,  George,  served  as  vice president from 1805 to 1812 under both Thomas  Jefferson and James Madison. But both of these presidents expressed their doubts about the project.

Governor  Clinton appointed  James Geddes to make the survey.

Geddes, who lived in Onondaga  County, was a lawyer, a judge, a former state legislator, and an amateur surveyor. The salt-producing town of Geddes was named after him, and he had been one of the pioneers of the local salt industry—the industry that needed  the canal.

He spent most of 1808 traveling between the Hudson River and Lake Erie, examining the topography.

In  1809,  a  New York  delegation  went  to  Jefferson,  hoping  to persuade him to consign federal funding for the project. The moment seemed auspicious. For the first time in the short history of the United States, the nation was solvent, had settled its huge debt, and revenue was expanding. But Jefferson said, “It is a splendid project and may be executed a century hence,” and concluded, “It is little short of madness to think of it at this time.”

Clinton then went looking for New York State funding for the project that was increasingly known as “Clinton’s ditch.” In 1810, the New York state legislature approved a “Board of Commissioners” with a $3,000 budget to investigate the feasibility of constructing a commercial canal connecting Lake Erie and the Hudson River. If this could be done, the United States would have a waterway from New York City to what is now the Midwest but was then thought of as the western frontier.

The public  regarded  this  commission  as  a  scam—a summer vacation at taxpayers’ expense to upstate New York, an area viewed in New York  City  as a scenic  vacation  ground.  This  suspicion  was reinforced by the revelation that a number of the commissioners were planning to take their wives.

The commission was losing support and probably would have been canceled had it not been  for a completely unrelated concern about a mud bar. The legislature assigned the canal commission to investigate the mud bar, which was of far greater public concern than the possible canal.

De Witt Clinton took part in the 1810 commission, which reported that the saltworks  were producing  far below their capacity but were limited by poor roads. Exploring alternatives, they asked locals what they felt would be the result if they built a good road from the saltworks to Lake Erie,  only nine  miles  away. Locals  gave Clinton his  ideal response by agreeing that such a road would only profit the British.

Canadian schooners on Lake Erie would pick up the salt and sell it in British North America. The final argument for the canal was the inevitable war with Britain from 1812 to 1815. When this war broke out, the Americans were faced  once again  with  a  salt  shortage.  The British  blockaded Massachusetts  and tried to  prevent  Cape Cod salt  from reaching Boston or New York,  though  wily New England  sailors  sometimes slipped  through at  night.  In December  1814,  the  British landed  a warship in Rock Harbor, on the bay side of Orleans, Cape Cod, and threatened to burn down the local salt-works. The summer before, the British had gotten to Washington, D.C., and burned most of the public buildings   including  the  presidential   residence,  forcing  President Madison to flee. So no one in Orleans doubted the British resolve to  burn their little windmill-and-rolling-roof saltworks.

A Cape Cod militia  was waiting  on the beach when the British attempted to land, and reportedly shot and killed two British sailors in a brief skirmish that forced the British to withdraw. A month later, Andrew Jackson won the final battle, the Battle of New Orleans, in which 2,000 British soldiers died, and Cape Codders could not resist calling their own brief engagement over their saltworks “the Battle of Orleans.”

AS SOON AS the war ended, lawmakers pushed  to approve the Erie Canal, and work began in 1817. The estimated cost of the project was $6 million—almost $5 per inhabitant of New York State.

Among the state’s plans to finance the completion of the canal was to tax upstate salt at a rate of 12.5 cents per bushel. It was one of the few salt taxes in history that was not resented. The canal would bring prosperity to the salt region.

The canal was built in sections, and each was put into service upon its completion. The first section to be completed was the ninety-eight miles from Utica to the Seneca River, the section that ran through the salt-producing  region.  A  weigh  station  to  assess  barge  loads, designed to look like a Grecian waterside temple, was built in the tiny, backwoods stopover of Syracuse.

In October 1825, the last section of the canal was completed, and Governor Clinton and other notables went to Buffalo to board the boats of a flotilla making the inaugural voyage  to New York City. The lead vessel  was the Seneca Chief, which carried  a portrait of Clinton in Roman toga by a distinguished  lithographer of the day. Among the notables joining Clinton on board was Joshua Forman. The vessel was provisioned  with symbolic  items, including two kegs of Lake Erie water to be poured into the Atlantic off Sandy Hook, some whitefish, a canoe made by Lake Superior tribesmen, and potash from the saltworks.

The Erie Canal was 363 miles long. Like most famous bridges and waterways, it occasionally attracted unhappy romantics wishing to leap to their death. But when they hit Clinton’s ditch, they were shocked to discover that, with limited  funding, the state  had only been able  to afford to dig the canal four feet deep.

THE CANAL HAD opened at a prosperous time for American salt. In 1837, Cape Cod alone had 658 salt companies producing more than 26,000 tons  per year.  But  Cape Cod lost its competitive  advantage  once upstate New York had its own waterway to New York City.

Not only did the New Yorkers now have more efficient transportation, but,  borrowing  Cape Cod ideas,  they also  made their  salt  more efficiently.

The Salt  Springs  are  in the  towns  of Liverpool,  Salina,  and Syracuse in the county of Onondaga. . . . The works which we had an opportunity of examining in Syracuse, are constructed upon the plan of the works upon the Cape and on our own coasts  and beaches—open and extensive  vats,  covered  at night and during the rainy and wet weather. But evaporation is hastened by boiling the water in large kettles constructed on purpose, in Liverpool and Salina. Wood is abundant and so cheap, that the expense is very trifling, the water is drawn up by horse and steam power, and it is estimated that 90 gallons of water  will make one bushel of salt, so perfectly is the water saturated with salt.—Barnstable Patriot, September 4, 1830

The New York saltworks  used Cape Cod–style rolling  roofs. Apparently, something about these roofs was great fun. In both Cape Cod and Syracuse, families were constantly complaining about their young sons slipping away to the saltworks and wearing out their pants sliding  down the  roofs  and crawling  between  the  vats.  Childhood memoirs contain detailed descriptions of the saltworks as playgrounds, with acres of vats dripping stalactites of white, amber, and rust red.

As the New York saltworks prospered, with salt vats taking up more and more acres, it became more difficult to roll back all the roofs in the face of a sudden downpour. Watchtowers were built with warning bells.

If the rain watchers saw dark clouds, they rang the bells and hundreds of workmen and their families immediately ran to push the covers over the vats.

The workers  lived  in villages  close  around the saltworks  so they could be near the vats when the bells rang. Then entire families ran to the  saltworks,  competing   with each other  to  be first  to  cover  a complete row. Winning families got small cash prizes.

Many of the New York salt workers were Irish. The Irish soaked  both potatoes and corn in brine. Salt potatoes, new potatoes cooked in brine much the same as were made by the salt workers in Guérande, are still a specialty of Syracuse.

Salina  was an important center  with hundreds  of saltworks  and several  hundred  homes. Syracuse,  chosen as  the  best  route  for canals, had been an undeveloped swampy lowland. Colonel William L.

Stone, passing through in 1820 when the Syracuse population was 250 people, wrote, “It was so desolate it would make  an owl weep to fly over it.”

The Erie  Canal ran west to east, and the Oswego Canal, which connected the Erie Canal to Lake Ontario, ran north to south. The two intersected  in the  center  of the  town of Syracuse.  With its  torch-lit bridges  over  reflecting  canals,  Syracuse  became known as  the “American  Venice.”  Once Syracuse  became Venice,  Salina  was reduced to a suburb. Syracuse was now, like the Italian Venice, a salt port, where Onondaga salt was loaded onto Erie Canal barges. By the time the full canal was opened, only five years after the town was said to sadden stray owls, Syracuse had tripled its population, and by 1850, 22,000 people lived there.

Not only did New York have a Venice, it had a Liverpool, the town being  named so that Onondaga  salt  could be shipped  around the United States with that trusted old brand name  “Liverpool salt.”

AFTER THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, a debate had begun about where to locate  the  capital  of  the  new country.  Virginians,  arguing  for  the Potomac,  made the  outlandish  claim  that this Virginia river,  which empties  into Chesapeake Bay, also  connected  with the  Ohio. This would have made the Potomac America’s central waterway, since the Ohio cuts through the Midwest and enters the Mississippi. It was a Virginia  propaganda  ploy,  and no such river  connecting  the  mid- Atlantic to the Mississippi  exists. However, Virginia did have a river that, while it never reaches the Atlantic, connected Virginia to the Ohio River. In the western part of the state, today West Virginia, the Great Kanawha River begins and flows into the Ohio, carrying goods and people to Cincinnati and Louisville. As Americans moved west across the Appalachians, this was one of the major routes. The river trade and migration turned the frontier town of Charleston, West Virginia, into a trading  center.  Pivotal  to  this  trade  and even more  pivotal to  the economic development of the Midwest was a ten-mile stretch of the Kanawha that produced salt.

On the northern bank of the Great Kanawha was a huge salt lick known as the Great Buffalo Lick. The first Europeans in the area noted indigenous people making salt at the lick and also noted the many wide  trails made by buffalo and deer  to this  place.  In fact,  it  was animals,  not so-called  trailblazers  such as Daniel Boone, that had carved the original trail across the Allegheny Mountains to the Ohio River Valley.

In  1769,  when Daniel  Boone followed  that  trail,  crossing  the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky, he took with him Kanawha salt, as did the thousands of other settlers that followed. In 1797, a man named Elisha Brooks leased land on the lick and sank the hollowed trunks of three sycamore trees ten feet into the ground. The three pipes served as wells. Using twenty-four kettles to evaporate the brine by burning almost five cords of wood, Brooks produced three bushels in a day. A decade later, the Ruffners, a family of inventive salt prospectors, made a new kind of drill by fitting an iron rod into a tapered wooden tube. A heavy wooden block was repeatedly raised and dropped on the rod, driving it into the ground, with the tube as a guide. But after seventeen feet, having reached solid rock, the rod would go no deeper. They then tried fitting a metal chisel to the rod, and the repeated pounding into the  rock below  slowly drilled a hole.  This  was considered  a great innovation  in drilling at the time, although the Sichuan Chinese had been doing  the  same thing  since  the  twelfth century.  In 1807,  the Kanawha salt makers even invented a tube with a valve on the bottom to extract brine in the same way the Chinese had been doing it for 700 years.

By 1809, with these new inventions, Kanawha was experiencing a boom. Some fifty  Kanawha salt  producers  had made their  small riverfront the most important salt region in the United States after the Onondaga region.  New holes  were  being  drilled,  and new boiling houses were being built. Most of the salt producers at Kanawha were short-term, small-scale operators who saw an opportunity to become wealthy  in only a few years.  In 1815,  when  fifty-five furnaces  were operating,  the largest  producer had four.  Most were  single-furnace operations burning local coal.

The War of 1812 created the Kanawha  saltworks’ best years. With no Liverpool salt and shortages everywhere, the number of furnaces increased in the three years of war from sixteen to fifty-two.

When you merely want to corn meat, you have nothing to do but to rub in salt plentifully and let it set in the cellar a day or two. The navel end of the brisket is one of the best pieces for corning.

A six pound piece of corned beef should boil three  full hours. Put it in to boil when the water is cold. If you boil it in a small pot, it is well to change the water, when it has boiled an hour and a half; the fresh water should boil before the half-cooked meat is put in again.—Lydia  Maria  Child, The American  Frugal  Housewife,1829

THE  GREAT  OPPORTUNITY for  Kanawha salt  came with  the  postwar midwestern pork and beef industries. Because Kanawha salt could move inexpensively  down the   Ohio   River,   midwestern  farmers produced tremendous quantities of pigs and cattle—especially pigs— and took them to the waterfront to be delivered to the river ports of Louisville and Cincinnati. There the meat was salt-cured and shipped throughout the settled parts of North America. Like the salt from the brine springs of Salies-de-Béarn, Kanawha salt was highly soluble and fast penetrating, ideally suited for curing meat.

The city of Cincinnati was built into a major commercial center with salt from Kanawha and pigs from Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. By the late  1830s, Cincinnati was packing  almost one third of all western American hogs—more than 100,000 hogs per year. Other centers on the Ohio  such as Louisville,  Kentucky,  and Madison,  Indiana,  also prospered.

Kanawha served  this  midwestern  market  with little  competition. Unlike the French and the Spanish, English settlers and their American descendants tended to bring salt with them  rather than find it where they went. In a market-driven society, a distant but efficient saltworks with good transportation seemed a more  practical solution than a nearby  but  inefficient  saltworks.  As Americans  moved west,  they shipped salt from the East, just as the settlers in the East had shipped it from England.

Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky saltworks, many of them adapted by the French from the saltworks of indigenous people, had weaker brine than Kanawha  and used wood rather than coal. This made Kanawha salt  far  cheaper  to  produce.  In fact,  even at  outrageously  inflated prices, Kanawha salt makers could still undersell their competitors, not only because of the density of their brine but because their workers were slaves.

Kanawha was in the state of Virginia, which had a huge slave-based tobacco industry that was slowly declining. The large tobacco plantations had more slaves than they could use, and the owners saw an economic  opportunity in renting  these  people  to  Kanawha salt producers. According to the 1810 census, Kanawha  county had 352 slaves, but by 1850, 3,140 slaves lived in the county, mostly assigned to saltworks.

By law the saltworks could only require slaves to work six days a week, but this law was seldom enforced. The best job for a slave at the saltworks was barrel maker.  The salt  was shipped  in barrels,  and slaves  were  expected  to  make seven barrels  a day. Sometimes owners who rented their slaves would negotiate better terms such as only six barrels being required a day. The worst job in the salt-works, and one almost exclusively done by slaves, was coal mining. Slave owners  would sometimes  stipulate  that their slaves  were  not to be used as coal miners, arguing  that it was a misuse of their valuable property. Coal miners were often maimed or killed in cave-ins. The saltworks themselves were also dangerous, especially for slaves who were  not trained  in this industry. Boilers  exploded, and sometimes workers  would  slip  into  near-boiling   pots  of  brine.  The owners sometimes sued the salt makers to be compensated for the loss or damage  of their human property.

Plantation slaves did not want to be leased to saltworks, and they would sometimes escape while being taken west. The slaves knew that, like the salt, they were only a short journey to Ohio, which was a free state. Many slaves escaped by land or water, and salt makers would hire men to go to Ohio and bring them back. Once steamboats appeared, runaways increased, in part because of the transportation the boats afforded and in part because the boats hired free blacks who would encourage escape. Even the slaves who worked on the boats clearly lived a better life than the slaves in Kanawha.

In January 1835, Judge Lewis Summers complained, “There seems to be some restlessness among  the slaves of the salt works and I thought more uneasiness in relation to that species of property than usual.”

ROBERT FULTON DID not invent the steamboat, though he did build one of the  first  submarines, The Nautilus, which the  French,  British,  and American governments  all rejected.  Fulton’s  enduring fame  comes from a steamboat he launched in New York harbor in 1807 that sailed the  Hudson. Numerous  earlier  steamboats  had been built,  and in 1790, John Fitch had established the first steamboat service, ferrying passengers between Philadelphia and Trenton. But such experiments were all commercial failures. Robert Fulton’s Hudson River boat made money and demonstrated for the first time the commercial viability of steam-powered, flat-bottom, paddle-wheel-propelled riverboats.

These boats  created  Kanawha’s  first  real  competition.  By the 1820s, steamboats for the first time made Liverpool salt accessible in the U.S. interior because  they had enough power to carry a heavy salt load  upriver against the strong currents of western waterways. The British liked to carry salt as ballast for their cotton trade  with New Orleans, and they landed Liverpool, Turks, and Salt Cay salt there. The new steamboats carried foreign salt up the Mississippi River system, including the Ohio. The shallow-hulled steamboats could even navigate past the falls of the Ohio at Louisville, which had previously excluded Madison and Cincinnati from Mississippi traffic.

While  this  was happening,  the  Erie  Canal  opened, providing Syracuse with a western waterway. Before the Erie Canal, Onondaga salt had to be carried by pack mule to Lake Erie. The New York salt was preferred by many because, as with French bay salt, the slow solar  evaporation process  produced  a desirable  coarse  grain. But because of slavery and ample nearby coalfields for fuel, Kanawha salt was cheaper.

No sooner was the Erie Canal opened  than other canal projects were proposed. The first one was started in 1832: a 334-mile artificial waterway  called  the  Trans-Ohio  Canal,  from  the  Ohio  River  to Cleveland on Lake Erie. Salt was the only bulk commodity transported on the Trans-Ohio Canal. By 1845, canals also connected Onondaga salt to the Wabash  in Indiana.

The Erie  Canal offered a refund on tolls to New York State  salt producers if they used the canal to carry salt out of state. In trade on the  Great  Lakes, salt  became ballast  where  empty  ships  had previously been weighted with sand. Sometimes they would carry the salt  for  free.  By the  1840s,  Syracuse,  not  Kanawha, became the leading supplier of salt in the Midwest.

IN  THE 1840S, the Kanawha  salt makers  received  another blow. The protective tariffs against imported salt designed to stimulate domestic salt production after the Revolution were angering westerners because they raised the price of salt. In their view, by taxing imported salt, the government   was  allowing   domestic   producers   to   overcharge.

Kanawha, in particular,  was the  salt  producer  singled  out  for this accusation.

In 1840, Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton delivered a speech in the U.S. Senate comparing Kanawha salt makers to the British East India  Company, a despised  instrument  of  British  colonialism,  the economic system that Americans had fought two wars against.

The tax on foreign salt, by tending to diminish its importation, and by throwing what was imported at its only seaport, New Orleans, into the hands of regraters, this tax was the parent and handmaiden of a monopoly of salt, which, for the extent of territory over which it operated, the number of people whom it oppressed, and the variety and enormity of its oppressions, had no parallel on earth,  except  among the Hindoos,  in Eastern Asia, under the iron despotism of the British East India Company. . . . The American  monopolizers  operate  by the moneyed power, and with the aid of banks. They borrow money and rent the salt wells to lie idle; they pay owners of the wells not to work them; they pay other owners not to open new wells. Thus, among us, they suppress the production, by preventing the manufacture  of salt.—Thomas Hart Benton, U.S. Senate, April 22, 1840

Among  the opponents  of Senator Benton in the Senate  was the delegation from Massachusetts, which desperately wanted to preserve the tariffs. But by the end of the decade  the tariffs were removed, and not only Kanawha  but also Cape Cod could no longer compete.

By 1849,  when Henry David  Thoreau visited  the Cape, he was already writing about saltworks being broken up and sold for lumber. Those boards, used to build storage sheds, were still leaching salt crystals 100 years later. By then the Cape Cod salt industry was long vanished.

Kanawha survived. Soon the country would be divided  into North and South, and it would become  apparent that a southern saltworks was an important and all too rare asset.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The War Between  the Salts

IN THE 1939 classic film of the Civil War, Gone With the Wind, Rhett Butler sneered at southern boasts of imminent victory, pointing out that not a single cannon was made in the entire South. But the lack of an arms industry was not the only strategic shortcoming of the South. It also did not make enough salt.

In 1858, the principal salt states of the South—Virginia, Kentucky, Florida, and Texas—produced 2,365,000 bushels of salt, while New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania produced  12,000,000 bushels.

By 1860, the United States  had become a huge salt consumer, Americans using far more salt per capita than Europeans. Numerous saltworks had sprung up in the  North.  Onondaga, the  leading  salt supplier, reached its peak production during the Civil War. The 200 acres of vats in 1829 had expanded to 6,000 acres by 1862, when it employed 3,000 workers and produced more than 9 million bushels of salt.

The United States as a whole was still dependent on foreign salt, but most of those imports went to the South. The imports from England and the British Caribbean were landed in the port of New Orleans. One quarter of all English salt entering the United States came through New Orleans. From 1857 to 1860, 350 tons of British salt were unloaded in New Orleans every day, ballast for the cotton trade.

As generals from George Washington to Napoléon discovered, war without salt is a desperate situation. In Napoléon’s retreat from Russia, thousands died from minor wounds because the army lacked salt for disinfectants. Salt was needed  not only for medicine and for the daily ration of a soldier’s diet but also to maintain the horses of a cavalry, and the workhorses that hauled supplies and artillery, and herds of livestock to feed the men.

Salt was always  on the  ration list for the  Confederate  soldier. In 1864, a soldier received as a monthly allowance ten pounds of bacon, twenty-six pounds of  coarse  meal,  seven pounds of  flour or  hard biscuit,  three  pounds  of rice,  one and a half pounds  of salt—with vegetables in season. But the Confederate ration list was in reality a wish list that was only occasionally realized.

The Union  army  generally  had ample  supplies,  and its  rations included salt, salt pork, occasionally bacon, and both fresh and salted beef. Here too reality did not quite live up to the ration list. The salt beef, of which a Union soldier was issued one pound, four ounces per day, was greenish in color and unlovingly nicknamed by the troops “salt-horse.” John Billings, a Union veteran, writing about the rations after  the  war,  mentioned  numerous  unpalatable  recipes  such as ashcake, which was cabbage  stuffed with salted cornmeal and water and baked in ashes.

Four  days after  the  war  began on April  12,  1861,  President Abraham  Lincoln  ordered  a  blockade  of  all  southern  ports.  The blockade was enforced until the war ended in 1865. The North was able  to put enormous resources into maintaining  it. At its height in 1865,  471  ships  with 2,455  guns were  being  used exclusively  to enforce the blockade.

The blockade caused shortages and the accompanying high prices of speculators for not only salt but many basic foods. In 1864, potatoes cost  $2.25  a bushel  in the  North and $25  a bushel  in Richmond.

Initially, the high prices posed more of a problem than scarcity. This recipe for salted beef appeared early in the war, when salt was still available but pork was unaffordable. When Bacon gets too costly.

A gentleman who has tried  the  following  recipe warmly recommends it: Cut the beef into pieces of the proper size for packing, sprinkle them with salt lightly, and let them be twenty four hours, after which shake off the salt and pack them in a barrel. In ten gallons of water, put four gallons salt, one pound saltpeter, half pound black pepper, half-pound allspice, and half gallon of sugar. Place the mixture in a vessel over a slow fire and bring to a boil. Then take it off and, when it has cooled pour it over the beef sufficient to cover it and  fill the barrel. After the lapse of three or four days, turn the barrel upside down to be sure the beef is all covered by brine. If the beef is good, it will make  it fit to set before a king. The beef will keep for a good long time. During the scarcity and exorbitant price of bacon our readers might try the recipe and test its virtue.—Albany Patriot, Georgia, October 31, 1861

When salt  first  started  to  become scarce  in  the  Confederacy, owners of large plantations in coastal areas reverted to the Revolutionary War practice of sending their slaves to fill kettles  with seawater for evaporation. But it soon became  apparent that both the blockade  and the war were  to be far more  serious than had been imagined. The small amount of salt produced from these kettles was not going to solve their problems.

At the outbreak of war, a 200-pound sack of Liverpool salt sold at the pier in New Orleans for fifty cents. After more than a year of the blockade, in the  fall of 1862, six dollars a sack was considered  a bargain in Richmond. By January 1863, the price in Savannah, a major port until the blockade, was twenty-five dollars for a sack.

The Union quickly realized that the salt shortage in the South was an important strategic advantage. General William Tecumseh  Sherman, one of the visionaries of a modern warfare in which cities are smashed and civilians starved, wanted to deny the South salt. “Salt is eminently contraband, because  of its use in curing meats, without which armies cannot be subsisted.” he wrote in August 1862.

When the war finally ended, and Generals  Ulysses  S. Grant and Robert E. Lee sat down to talk, Lee said that his men had not eaten in two days and asked Grant for food. According to some observers, when the Union supply wagons  were pulled  into sight, the defeated soldiers of the famished Army of Northern Virginia let out a cheer.

IN 1861, THE western counties of Virginia organized into West Virginia, and Union general Jacob Dolson Cox marched in from Ohio up the valley of the Great Kanawha River. By July 1861, he controlled the entire valley, including the saltworks. It was one of the first major blows to the South. But in the fall of 1862, Confederate loyalists asked for volunteers to liberate the saltworks, and in a surprise attack a force of 5,000 Confederates drove the Union soldiers back to the Ohio River so quickly that they did not have time to destroy the saltworks before they retreated.

The Union learned  a lesson  from  this:  In the  future,  when they captured saltworks, they destroyed them. If the saltworks  were brine wells, as in Kanawha—which Cox retook in November 1862, never to be retaken by the South—they broke the pumps and shoved the parts back down the wells. This contrasts with the Confederates, who when they took a saltworks celebrated  having captured  it  and went into production.

A clerk in the Confederate War Department, blaming Confederate president Jefferson Davis’s lack of resolve for the loss of Kanawha, wrote in his diary:

The President may seem to be a good nation-maker  in the eyes of distant statesmen, but he does not seem to be a good salt-maker for this nation. The works he has just relinquished to the enemy manufacturer: 7000 bushels  of salt per day—two million and a half per year—an ample  supply  for the  entire population of the Confederacy, is  an object adequate  to the maintenance of an army of 50,000 in that valley. Besides, the troops  that are  necessary for its  occupation will soon be in quarters, and quite as expensive to the government as if in the valley. A Caesar, Napoleon, a Pitt, and a Washington, all great nation-makers, would have deemed this work worthy of their attention.

AS THE WAR went on, the Union army attacked saltworks wherever it found  them,  from Virginia  to  Texas. The Union navy attacked  salt production all along the Confederate coast. At first, saltworks prospered  on the Florida  Gulf Coast because the area was largely untouched by the war. By the fall of 1862, the Union noticed the size and importance of Florida Gulf salt production along the entire coast,

but   especially   between   Tampa,  on  the   mid–gulf   coast,   and Choctawhatchee  Bay, on the  western  end of the  panhandle,  near Alabama. The saltworks were usually hidden a few miles up inlets and were  barely visible  from the gulf. Even if detected, the inlets were difficult for gunboats to navigate.

On September 8, 1862, the Union vessel Kingfisher approached the saltworks at St. Joseph Bay on the panhandle under a flag of truce and gave the Confederate  salt workers two hours to abandon  the site.

Taking  with them four cartloads of salt, the workers left. Three days later the Union navy destroyed the works.

On October 4, 1862, marines from the Union gunboat Somerset, moving farther down the coast, raided saltworks near Cedar Key on Suwannee Bay. After about twelve shells were fired, the salt workers raised a white flag. A landing crew met no resistance and destroyed several saltworks. But when they approached the one from which the white flag  was flying,  twenty-five  men concealed  in the  rear  of the building  opened fire.  Half the  Union forces  were  wounded  before reinforcements  arrived from a nearby Union steamship. After driving the Confederate fighters into retreat, the Union landing party destroyed the boilers, an odd assortment of makeshift contraptions, and set the houses on fire. Some of the boilers and kettles were made of such thick iron that they had to fire howitzers  at them to blow them apart.

“The rebels here needed a lesson, and they have had it,” said  the commander of the Somerset.

The Union navy continued to attack saltworks on the Florida coast, burning houses, blowing apart equipment. By 1863, it had destroyed more than $6 million worth of saltworks back up at the panhandle in the St. Andrews Bay area. But saltworks, although easily destroyed, are just as easily and inexpensively rebuilt. In three months, many of the destroyed works were back in production.

Northern salt  was smuggled  into the  South along  with weapons, especially in Tennessee. Salt was also a common item of blockade runners. Liverpool salt was shipped to the Mexican port of Veracruz and from there to Brownsville, Texas, and into the Confederacy. Mississippi  governor John J. Pettus  came up with an elaborate scheme  to import 50,000 sacks of French salt in exchange  for cotton brought to the shore of Lake Pontchartrain. The exchange was to be one bale of cotton for ten sacks of salt, arranged through the French and British consuls, to whose governments the Union blockade largely meant a loss of commerce. But though 500 bales of cotton were turned over to France, the French never delivered the salt.

WORKING  CONDITIONS   AT the  improvised  wartime  saltworks  of  the Confederacy were even worse than those at Kanawha had been. At the saltworks that sprung up along the Tombigbee River, a few miles north of Mobile, Alabama, new wells were dug every day by people who had come from  as  far  away as  Georgia.  During  the  war, southerners  traveled hundreds  of miles  to the  seacoast  or a brine spring to make salt. The area along the Tombigbee, protected by a Confederate fort in case the Union took Mobile, was marked by a vast traffic jam of carts and wagons  filled not only with pots and boilers and other potential salt-making equipment  but with poultry and other food— anything that could be traded for salt. Overseers drove the mule teams, and slaves followed behind on foot.

Some slaves chopped  wood for fuel, the air shaking with hundreds of axes thudding into wood, while others dug fifteen-foot wells. In the beginning  of the war, anyone  could come and spend a few weeks making salt, but by 1862, leases regulated by the Alabama legislature were required. By then the woods had been thinned out, and there was a  fuel  shortage.  Shallow  pans were  designed  for  more  efficient evaporation over two-foot-high furnaces with grates and iron doors.

This equipment could make twenty to thirty-five bushels of salt a day, depending  on the salinity of the water.  Salt  makers  found  that the deeper the well, the saltier the water, and began boring deeper into the bottoms of the original wells.

Slaves on long shifts kept the wells operating twenty-four hours every day. The saltworks were so close to each other that the area became a single undulating gnarled mass of slave labor. Land was set aside for a graveyard, which quickly filled as shivering slaves fell over from malaria or smallpox. Shoving and bumping against each other as they frantically labored to produce salt, slaves slipped and fell into boiling pans. Some died a quick death, but others died only after days of pain.

There were few white workers because  most of the white men were drafted into the Confederate army. A handful of supervisors were draft rejects or wounded  discharged veterans. As the war went on, more and more  works  were  supervised  by wounded veterans,  usually amputees.  In  April  1862,  when the  first  Confederate  draft  was declared, there were no exemptions for salt makers, but by August Jefferson Davis revised the conscription to exempt them. Making salt became a way to avoid military service. Deserters also drifted to the saltworks,  hoping  either  to  be safe  in the  swamps or to  earn  an exemption as a salt  worker.  In the  last  year  of the  war,  the  army searched  wagons headed for the  salt-works,  looking  for deserters among the exhausted slaves, the amputees, and the draft dodgers. By then, so many had deserted the Confederate army that there was even an organized deserter association in Virginia.

Refugees from attacked areas came to saltworks  hoping to find a way to survive. Soon gamblers added themselves to the mix. Baptists and Methodists  sent  ministers  to  this  increasingly  iniquitous  labor camp.

THE SHORTAGES  IN the South presented  opportunities  to speculators. One way to earn a considerable fortune was to buy up a salt-producing area and control the local salt price. A single proprietor in Apalachicola controlled all of West Florida. To prevent such schemes, laws were passed in Georgia restricting coastline ownership.

Salt workers wanted to be paid in salt rather than money so that they too could profit from the inflated prices. Officials in the central government at Richmond, realizing the declining value of their money and the rising value of salt, stored large quantities of salt for possible barter arrangements.

A small packet of salt became a fashionable and much-valued gift. One such packet was a wedding present to George Edward Pickett, who later  reached  the  most  northerly point  of  any Confederate  in combat when, on July 3, 1863, he led a ruinous charge up a sloping Pennsylvania field—the climax of the Battle of Gettysburg.

By 1862, Governor John G. Shorter of Alabama said, “The danger of a  salt  famine  is  now almost  certain.”  From  Mississippi,  Governor Pettus  wrote  to Jefferson Davis  that meat  was being  wasted  and vanishing  from  diets  because there  was no salt  to  preserve  the animals after slaughter.

A woman in South Carolina wrote:

It happened   that  my host  at  Radcliffe,  just  previous  to  the breaking  out of hostilities, had ordered a boatload of salt, to use  upon certain  unsatisfactory  lands   [for   fertilizer],  and realizing that a blockaded coast would result in a salt famine, he hoarded his supply until the time of need  should come. When it became known that  Senator  Hammand’s  salt  supply  was available, everyone from far and near came asking for it. It was like going down into Egypt for corn, and the precious crystals were distributed to all who came, according to the number in each family.

Family salt supplies were  carefully hidden like a stash of jewels. Cheap salts cut with such substances as ash went on the market.

Tallahassee Sentinel warns its readers of the folly of buying the dark and impure salt that is brought along the coast. It The will not save meat but spoil it. We are informed that some of the salt makers, who are making for market, make an inferior article, for which they charge six and eight dollars a bushel. It were better to give twelve dollars or more per bushel and get a good article, than to buy that which is  comparatively worthless at half the price. If our  people will refuse to buy the inferior article  it will soon induce  salt  makers  to make a good salt.  Pure  salt  is white, and that which is best for saving meat is large-grained. A word to the wise is sufficient.—Southern Confederacy, Atlanta, August 28, 1862

Rumors spread of possible salt substitutes. In 1862, there was a rumor of a substitute  for curing  bacon and beef. A newspaper  in Alabama reported that pyroligneous acid, a vinegar made from hard wood, could preserve meat. A phenomenally popular British book of the period warned against it.

A very impure variety of pyroligneous  acid, or vinegar made from the destructive distillation of wood, is sometimes used, on account of the highly preservative power of creosote which it contains, and also to impart the smoke-flavour; in which later object, however, the coarse flavour of tar is given, rather than that derived  from the  smoke from the  combustion  of wood.

—Isabella Beeton, Beeton’s Book of Household Management,

1861

One southern publication suggested  three ways to  preserve  fish without salt:

With oil: Put the fish in jars and pour over them salad oil until they are covered, then tie them up air tight. This is a rather expensive method  in this country, but for fish that is  afterward fried, it  is excellent.

With sugar: Fish may be preserved in a dry state, and kept quite  fresh by means of  sugar  alone,  and even with a small quantity of it. Fish may be kept in that state for some days, so as to be good when boiled as if just caught. If dried  and free from moldiness, there seems no limit to their preservation, and they are much better  in this  way than when salted.  The sugar  has no disagreeable taste. The process is particularly valuable in making what is  called  kippered salmon, and the fish preserved  in this manner are far superior  in quality and flavor to those which are salted or smoked. If desired, as much salt may be used to give the  taste  that  may be required.—Southern  Cultivator, Augusta

and Athens, Georgia, March–April 1863

People tried curing beef with saltpeter and bacon with wood ash, neither of which worked very well. Newspapers were constantly revealing alternative techniques for curing, most of which were ineffective. Frequently these newspaper recipes, to inspire their suffering readers, made references to the  salt shortages of the American Revolution. In 1861, a Richmond paper told the story of a Tory of Albemarle who had been refused salt because of his political sympathies. Still, his wife made  good bacon with only one peck of salt and a large quantity of hickory ashes.

In applying the ashes, it is well to have a bucket of molasses, and apply a portion with a white-washing  brush to each joint. When well smeared, rub on the ashes, which will thus adhere firmly and make an impenetrable  cement.—Daily  Richmond

Examiner, November 23, 1861

New ideas  for  salt  conservation were  a constant  topic  between neighbors. Those who lived by coasts would cook their starch—rice, hominy, or grits—in seawater, which would provide the only salt in a meal. When eating salted meat, people would carefully brush off every loose salt crystal for reuse. The brine in troughs and barrels used for pickling was afterward boiled down and made into salt to use again. The earth around smokehouses, made salty from years of drippings, was dug up and placed in hoppers designed for leaching ashes in soap making. This technique yielded a brine that could be evaporated, leaving a dull, darkish bed of salt crystals.

Coal  consists  mainly of the  carbon in wood, which  in burning forms a very dry heat. Most of our readers are familiar with the usual process of barbecuing large pieces of meat over coals. If such meat were  too high above the coal-fire  to roast, it would soon dry. When dry, a very little  salt and smoking  will keep it indefinitely. Like cured bacon, it should be packed  in tight casks, and kept in a dry room.

After one kills his hogs, if he is short of salt, let him get the water out of the meat by drying it over burning coals as soon as possible, first rubbing  it with a little salt.

Shade trees around a meat house are injurious by creating dampness. Dry meat with a coal-fire  after  it is  smoked. You may dislike to have meat so dry as is suggested, but your own observation will tell you that the dryest hams  generally keep the best. Certainly sweet, dry bacon  is far better than moist, tainted bacon, and our aim is simply to show how meat may be cured and long kept with a trifle of salt, when war has rendered the latter scarce and expensive.—Dr. F. P. Porcher of the Confederate army, Economy in the Use of Salt, 1863

HOW TO MANUFACTURE SALT FOR HOME USE

Take a towel, or any piece of cloth—say, two yards long—sew the two ends together, hang it on a roller, and let one end revolve in a tub or basin of salt water; the sun and air will act on the cloth, and evaporate the water rapidly. It must be revolved several times throughout the day, so that the cloth is well saturated. When the solution is evaporated to near the bottom, dip from the concentrated brine and pour it in a large flat dish or plate; let it remain in the sun until the salt is formed; taking  it in every night, and placing a cover on it. This is accomplished by capillary attraction, and can be manufactured  for $1 per sack, on a large scale. Each gallon of salt water will produce two and a half ounces of salt when evaporated.

p.s. To make salt requires a little  patience, as it  is  of slow formation.—John   Commins,   Charleston   tannery, Charleston

Mercury, June 11, 1862

JUST   BEFORE   THE war  began, French  geologist  M.  J.  Raymond Thomassy wrote that Louisiana, with its sugar and cotton, needed only to add salt production to its economy  to become truly wealthy. He warned:

Just as this element of future prosperity, this vital food, almost as necessary to their economic independence as gunpowder has been to  the  national  independence,  is  furnished  them exclusively by strangers, and is found in hands, which, in spite of all the dreams of perpetual peace, could easily some day become those of an enemy, and be made into an instrument, if not of domination,  at  least  of famine  and internal trouble.— Géologie Pratique de la Louisiane, 1860

Thomassy had a theory, dismissed by most people in Louisiana at the time, that certain areas in the southern part of the state—in particular, a swampy area once known as Petite Anse, meaning “little harbor”—were sitting on beds of rock salt. Petite Anse was covered with ferns and long-rooted trees dripping in moss and broad-leafed growths so thick, only a skilled local would be able to see it was an island, a raised area of 2,200 acres, surrounded by dark waterways connecting bayous that ran into the Mississippi and the nearby Gulf of Mexico at a harbor called Vermilion Bay.

When John Hayes settled in Petite Anse in 1791, salt had been made there for a very long time. In a slight variation on the Saliesde- Béarn and Lüneburg pig-in-the-marsh story, Hayes was supposedly hunting deer, not boar, and it was he, not his prey, who discovered the brine, when he stopped to drink some water.

Soon after Hayes found this natural brine spring in Petite Anse, a man named Jesse McCaul bought nineteen acres there and began making salt. He dug several wells, and at a depth of three to six inches, he found pottery fragments. Later  it would  be discovered that these fragments were spread over a five-acre area, the site of a prehistoric saltworks  in  the  manner  of  the  early  Romans, where  brine  was evaporated in pottery and then the pots were broken. Piles of ancient shards  are  occasionally  still  found  on the  island.

Archaeologists believe these saltworks are 1,000 years old. But recently a mound was found on the island in a place called Banana  Bayou that was carbon- dated to about 2500 B.C., which would make  it one of the oldest man- made structures ever found in the United States.

Neither Hayes nor McCaul did much with the salt of Petite Anse, the island  in  the  swamp with invisible  shores.  McCaul  tried,  digging several wells, but failing to make  a profit, he abandoned  the project.

When the War of 1812 drove salt prices up, sending entrepreneurs looking for brine, a man named John Marsh turned Petite Anse into a profitable saltworks.

In 1841, New Orleans was the third largest city in the United States, a leading port, and an obvious destination for Edmund  McIlhenny of Maryland,  seeking  his  fortune  in banking.  In Creole  New Orleans, dominated by the descendants of French and Spanish settlers, people like McIlhenny were immigrants called “Americans.” Working his way up from bookkeeper in this cosmopolitan city, already famous  for its local  cuisine  and foreign restaurants,  by 1857 McIlhenny  had five banks in Louisiana and was a wealthy man enjoying the luxuries of his adopted  metropolis.  He befriended  a Baton  Rouge judge, Daniel Dudley Avery, who was only five years  older. Avery had married a Marsh and come into possession of Petite Anse, which he used as a sugar plantation.

In 1859, to the shock of some, the middle-aged McIlhenny married his friend’s young daughter, Mary Eliza Avery. Wishing to escape the war and continue their sumptuous Louisiana lives, both the McIlhenny and Avery families  moved to the  sheltering  dark  bayous of Petite Anse. There they might have lived out the war quietly, had it not been for the discovery that Thomassy, the French geologist, had been right.

Edmund McIlhenny. McIlhenny Company, Avery Island, Louisiana

On May 4, 1862, a slave at the bottom of a sixteen-foot hole, while attempting to clean and deepen a brine well, said he had hit a log that he could  not  remove.  Upon investigation,  it  was found  that  the obstruction was solid salt. Petite Anse was sitting on a bed of solid, remarkably pure salt, estimated to be about forty feet deep, with 7 million tons  of salt. Generations  later, it would  be realized  that this estimate had been far too modest.

The  discovery,   although    it   was  exactly  what  Thomassy had predicted, came as a great surprise. The salt was especially valuable because it  was much  purer and drier than  most  rock  salt.  It  was extremely hard and had to be blasted with dynamite, which yielded great jagged  chunks  of white crystal. To transport the salt, the two families   built  a  two-mile-long  causeway across  the  bayou and swampland to the town of New Iberia.

Suddenly  the  genteel  McIlhennys  and Averys  found  themselves sitting on a strategic war target. They began producing salt for the South. Judge Avery was flooded  with offers  for contracts. Governor Pettus wrote fellow Mississippian Jefferson Davis that there was at Petite Anse “salt for all the Confederacy.” Newspapers ran reports of similar salt finds, but most were false rumors.

Union forces made several attempts to take Petite Anse, and the families fled to Texas. In January 1863, the Union sent a steamer and two gunboats to Vermilion Bay, two miles from the island salt-works.

That night, the wind shifted to the north and drove the water from the bayou, and by morning the two gunboats were aground in mud, where they remained stuck for the next twenty days. But on April 17, 1863, a Union colonel took his troops south of New Iberia and attacked the saltworks,  destroying  eighteen  buildings  with their  steam  engines, boiling  and mining  equipment,  as well  as 600  barrels  of  urgently needed salt that was about to be shipped throughout the Confederacy.

The Union troops were surprised at how easily they took this major saltworks and interpreted the inability of the Confederates to defend this strategic point as a sign that the South was crumbling.

But some of the bloodiest battles of the war were yet to come. With the help of liberated slaves, the Union continued to cripple the southern war  effort by attacking saltworks—Darien, Georgia, and Back Bay, Virginia, in September, and Bear Inlet, North Carolina, on Christmas Day. The following  year,  it  destroyed  saltworks  at  Goose Creek, Florida;  Masonborough  Inlet,  North  Carolina;  Cane  Patch,  South Carolina; Tampa and Rocky Point, on Tampa Bay; and Salt House Point, Alabama. On December 10, the day Sherman completed his march of destruction through Georgia, troops under George Stoneman marched from Knoxville, Tennessee, with the objective of destroying saltworks and supply depots in eastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia.   On  December   20,   Stoneman’s   troops   destroyed   the saltworks at Saltville, Virginia. On February 1, 1865, one last time, the Union navy destroyed the saltworks in St. Andrews Bay on the Florida panhandle.

Even civil wars produce occasional acts of kindness. Eighteen days after the final attack on St. Andrews Bay, General Oliver Otis Howard, having  taken  Columbia,  South  Carolina,  ordered  that  before  the storehouses  were  destroyed,  the  Columbia  hospital  was to  be furnished with as much salt as it needed  and that more salt be saved for the poor who had been burned out of their homes.

TO KEEP MEAT FROM SPOLING IN SUMMER

Eat it early in the Spring.---Confederate States Plmanac, Micon, Georgia, 1865

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Red Salt

AFTER THE  WAR ended, with more  than  1  million Americans  dead, Dudley Avery returned to Petite Anse. He had fought for the Confederacy and survived such battles as Shiloh, Tennessee, where 1,723  Confederates  and 1,754  Union  soldiers  were  killed  in  a standoff.  Not only did  Judge Avery’s  son survive,  but the  Judge’s finances remained sound enough that he could buy the remaining third of the 2,200-acre  island, and Petite Anse became Avery Island, a single-family property for the first time in history.

Edmund McIlhenny and his wife returned from Texas, where he had offered his business skills in the service of the Confederate army’s commissary and paymaster’s office. Before he had fled, McIlhenny had earned a considerable fortune from salt. But he had accepted payment in Confederate  bills. Knowing  that the salt prices  on which he had earned this mountain of useless money were not going to come again, he went to New Orleans in search of new business opportunities.

Postwar New Orleans offered few opportunities for an out-of-work banker. At this critical moment, McIlhenny’s story becomes  uncertain because he left no record  of the  events. All that remains  are  the recollections of various relatives who had been told parts of the story. Apparently, a man came up to McIlhenny on the street. In one version he was an old veteran of the 1846 Mexican-American War. In a more probable  version,  he was a Confederate  veteran  who had fled  to Mexico  to avoid  being  taken by the Union army. This  man, whose name was Gleason,  was very  excited  about  a  certain  Mexican seasoning, small red chili peppers.

In 1866, unsuccessful in resurrecting his business career, McIlhenny returned to Avery Island and resolved to become a gentlemen farmer, experimenting with hot peppers.

THE BURN OF a pepper  comes from a substance  called  capsaicin, which is a natural poison designed to protect the plant by making it inedible.  But  Mexicans,  Caribbeans,  and a great  number  of other people have not been deterred. Capsaicin develops in sunlight and certain soils. With peppers, as with wine grapes, the place where they are grown makes all the  difference. The peppers that Edmund McIlhenny brought home, subsequently labeled Capsicum frutescens, when grown on the fertile soil on the edges of Avery Island,  were extremely hot.

The idea of a pepper sauce was not new to southern Louisiana. The Cajuns, French refugees who fled Nova Scotia after it fell to the British in the eighteenth century, had settled along the bayous  in the Avery Island area, and they, like the Creoles of New Orleans, had learned to use hot peppers brought by the Caribbean and Mexican people who came through the port. Before the Civil War, New Orleans cooks dried hot peppers and marinated them in sherry and vinegar. Red pepper and salt were already a common seasoning blend in Cajun cooking. McIlhenny’s wife, Mary Eliza Avery, left a handwritten collection of recipes.  Since  she used her maiden name on the  front page, the collection can be dated before 1859, the year of her marriage. In this collection of Cajun and southern Louisiana recipes, numerous dishes call for “red pepper and salt.”

SHRIMP GUMBO

Take a chicken and cut it up as for a fricassee. Put in your soup pot a spoon full of lard, when hot stir in two table spoons  full of flour until it becomes a lite brown color; chop fine a large onion, and throw into the flour and lard with the chicken, stirring it until the chicken becomes  slightly cooked. Add boiling water as [appropriate?]  for a soup stirring well. Put in red pepper and salt to your taste, with a bunch of parsley and thyme (this preparation can be made of shrimp as well as chicken). Take 4 or 5 pints of shrimps and pour boiling water on them when they first come from market.

Take the meat and the roe from the shells. Put the heads and shells into a stirr-pan, covering them with boiling water. Mash them so as to extract the juice—strain it andadd the liquid to the soup. About 15 minutes before sending to table throw in the Shrimps. When ready to serve the soup, stir in a large tablespoonful of fresh Fillet and turn immediately into the tureen.—Mary Eliza Avery

McIlhenny started his pepper sauce experiments with a variation on a sauerkraut recipe, using salt to ferment and extract juices from fresh crushed  peppers. He quickly learned  that he had to use the ripest peppers, picking each of the fruits of his annual plant at its optimum moment, when  it was the brightest red. Stirring half a cup of his own Avery Island salt into each gallon, he aged the mixture, trying pickling jars and then pork barrels. He covered the lids with salt, which, when mixed with the juices of the fermenting peppers, sealed the barrel with a hard crust, by chance  the same way the Chinese had been aging bean mash for soy sauce  for thousands of years.

Up to this point, it was an all-Avery-Island product, made with the island’s salt and peppers. In much of the South, the Caribbean, and Mexico,  this  would  constitute  a hot  sauce. But  the  New Orleans tradition called for vinegar. McIlhenny strained  the mash  after it had aged for one month, and mixed it with French white wine vinegar. Then he put it in small cologne bottles, which he sealed with green wax. Each bottle came with a little sprinkler attachment that could be placed in the opening after the seal was broken.

McIlhenny had a shed on Avery Island that he called his laboratory, a place with a sweet pungent smell that tickled the nostrils and made passersby want to sneeze. He would let his children leave school early to help him in the laboratory.

In 1869, he produced 658 bottles and sold them for the handsome price of one dollar each wholesale in New Orleans and along the Gulf. People used the sauce as a seasoning in recipes that called for red pepper  and salt.  In  1870,  he obtained  a patent  and named the concoction Petite Anse Sauce. His family was appalled that he was commercializing  the historic family name for his eccentric project. So he settled  for Tabasco sauce, after the  Mexican state  on the Gulf known for hot peppers, possibly even the area where the mysterious Gleason had obtained the original peppers.

April 28, 1883, Harper’s  Weekly drawing of salt mining under Avery Island.

These were not lucrative years on Avery Island. An attempt to return to salt mining was a failure. By 1890, when Edmund McIlhenny died at age seventy-five, he had built a modest family business with Tabasco sauce, though nothing  compared  to  the  fortune  he had earned  in useless currency from two years of wartime salt.

AFTER THE CIVIL War, while pepper sauce was looking more lucrative than salt in Louisiana, the American West offered dramatic opportunities.  The West  was rich in precious  minerals and in salt, which was still used to purify ore, especially silver.

The most spectacular salt strike in North America was found in a shrinking glacial lake in Utah. In the eighteenth  century, the Spanish, while searching Utah for gold and silver, had been told of a huge salt lake. But they never saw it. The first record of anyone  of European origin seeing the Great Salt Lake was in 1824 by James Bridger, a hunter, trapper, and explorer who was the prototype of the legendary “mountain man.”

In Carthage, Illinois, in 1846, an angry mob assassinated Joseph Smith, the leader of a new religious group known as the Mormons. Brigham Young, who took Smith’s place, wanted to find a new land where  Mormons  could  set  up their own community away from the scrutiny  of  other  Americans.  In  search  of  a  place  with  natural resources,  so that  his  isolated  group  could  have economic  self-sufficiency, he chose this Great Salt Lake in the middle of a desert that at the time belonged to Mexico. The lake had no outlet and contained highly concentrated brine. Next to it was one of the largest sebkhas ever found—a flat, thick, 100-mile-long layer of salt, which became  a mainstay of the Mormon economy.

Other salt beds were found in the West, but none so large or with as pure a concentration of sodium chloride as the Great Salt Lake area, the  remains  of  a  far  larger  20,000-square-mile  prehistoric  lake geologists call Lake Bonneville.

But the real need for salt lay farther west in Nevada  and California, where silver was found. Relatively close to these silver strikes was one of the oldest saltworks in the American West.

The  southern  end of  San  Francisco  Bay is  an  insalubrious marshland with ideal conditions  for salt making. Not only does it have more sun and less rainfall than San Francisco and the north bay, but it has wind to help with evaporation. The intensely hot air from central California comes over the mountains, and the temperature difference sucks in the cool sea breeze.

This is why centuries and perhaps millennia before the California and Nevada silver strikes, a people called the Ohlone made annual pilgrimages to this area for salt making. At the water’s edge, the brine slowly evaporated in the sun and wind and left a thick layer of salt crystals. They had only to scrape it. The first European to notice the local salt making was a Spanish priest, José Danti, who explored the eastern side of the bay in 1795. In the southern end of the east bay, he found marshes with thick layers of salt, and “the natives,” he reported, told him that it provided  salt for much of the area.

The Spanish were content to let the Ohlone produce salt. They only wanted a share—a very large one—of the profits. To this end, they forced the Ohlone to turn all their salt over to the Spanish missionaries who controlled distribution. The only technology added by the Spanish was to  drive  stakes  into  the  ground  at  the  water’s  edge to  offer additional evaporation surfaces.

In 1827, Jedidiah Smith, one of the earliest U.S. citizens to settle in California,  arrived  in San Francisco  Bay and noted  that “from  the Southeast  extremity  of  the  bay extends  south a considerable  salt marsh from which great quantities of salt are annually collected and the quantity might perhaps be much increased. It belongs to Mission San Jose.”

After  California   became a  state   in  1850,  a  San  Francisco dockworker named John Johnson became interested in this salt area. At  age  thirty-two,  his  life  story  was already  a  popular  legend. Supposedly, he had lost both parents  in a fire from which he was saved as a baby in Hamburg, Germany. He went to sea at thirteen and was one of two hands that survived on a sinking ship by perching on top of the highest two masts for twelve  hours. He was said to have been a sealer,  a whaler,  and a slaver—a  ruthless  adventurer  who would  try anything   to  make money. When he learned  about  the southeast part of the bay, he decided to try salt.

At first, Johnson was able to charge extremely high prices and make tremendous  profits.  But  this  was the  time  of  the  gold  rush,  and adventurers  from all over  the  world were  coming  to the  Bay area looking for quick profits. Many followed Johnson to the south bay. Soon abundance caused the price to crash.

San Francisco Bay salt was considered of low quality, and it did not compete  easily  with Liverpool  salt,  which came as ballast  on the British  ships  that  bought  California  wheat.  Coarse  salt  was also regularly imported from China, Hawaii, and numerous places in South America.

But in 1859, something happened that drove salt prices back up. In western Nevada near  the California  border,  a three-and-a-half-mile stretch of the Sierra Nevada  mountains was found to hold the richest vein of silver ever discovered in the United States. It was called the Comstock lode, named after an early investor who had sold out before the extent of the vein was known. The silver ore was being separated by a technique similar to the sixteenth-century Mexican patio process, and it required mountains of salt.

By 1868, only nine years after the discovery of the Comstock lode, eighteen salt companies were operating in the south bay. To keep the profit margin high, the salt was mostly harvested by Chinese laborers, the cheapest source of labor in California at the time. The salt workers wore wide wooden sandals to avoid sinking in the thick layer of white crystals.

After a few years of scraping, the area was running out of naturally evaporated salt, and the salt producers started building successive artificial ponds, pumping the water from one pond to the next by the power of windmills.

Fortunes were being made on the silver in Nevada  and on the salt in California. Then, in 1863, a man named Otto Esche came up with a scheme to  make money on the  link between  them.  The salt  was shipped  inland  and into the  Sierra  Nevadas in horse-drawn  carts.

Esche went to Mongolia, even today one of the more remote corners of the earth, and bought thirty-two Bactrian camels. Esche apparently knew something  of  camels  since  he chose the  more  docile  two-humped camel rather than the notoriously temperamental dromedary of the Middle East. Bactrian camels, since before Marco Polo’s time, had been carrying  goods, including  salt,  across  the  brown,  wide, Mongolian desert.

The first discouraging surprise was that only fifteen camels survived the cross-Pacific voyage  to California. The survivors arrived in such bad condition  that it took Esche months to nurse them back to good health. They carried salt across the mountains, but the strange, furry, long-legged creatures were not well received in Nevada.

The silver miners can be added to a long list of novices who have found  that camels, even the better-tempered  Bactrians, can be disagreeable. They bite, spit, and kick. The miners hated them, as did their horses and mules, who became hysterical at the sight of them. This reaction by the other animals made the camels a public nuisance. A few would lope into town, and suddenly the street was alive with neighing,  braying,  and kicking.  Virginia  City,  Nevada, passed an ordinance  outlawing  camels  on the  town  streets  except  between midnight and dawn, when, presumably,  the  other  animals  were  in stables resting. Eventually, to the relief of the miners, Esche gave up on the camels and released them in the Nevada desert to thrive on their own. Since no camel colony has ever been discovered there, it is assumed  they all died, probably a slow, pitiful death.

IN THE SPRING, seawater was pumped into the ponds of the south bay. Through the summer, the brine would be moved; by late summer, it was dense enough to crystallize. The brine turned pink and then a dark brick   color.  Today, when people   fly  into   San  Francisco,  they sometimes gaze out the window and wonder about the pink-and-brown geometric ponds at the end of the bay.

The color  is  a common  phenomenon  that had previously been observed in Europe, in the Dead Sea, and in China, among many other places that made sea salt. Both Strabo and Pliny wrote about this curious color in brine that later disappeared after crystallization. Strabo, who pondered the color of parts of the Red Sea, thought it was caused by either heat or a reflection.

In Salt and Fishery, Discourse Thereof, Collins had mentioned the phenomenon,  attributing the  color  to red  sand. The red  color was generally thought to be an impurity that could cause spoilage, and it was believed that it might turn the fish or meat red and then the food would  soon spoil.  In  1677,  Anton  van Leeuwenhoek,  the  Dutch naturalist who made numerous discoveries with a crude microscope, concluded that the red color was caused by microorganisms in the brine.

Whatever the cause, the simple observable fact, as Denis Diderot pointed out in his eighteenth-century encyclopedia, is that “you know the salt is forming when the water turns red.”

Charles Darwin observed the phenomenon in Patagonia:

Parts  of the  lake  seen from  a short  distance  appeared  of reddish color, and this perhaps was owing to some ifusorial animalcula. The mud in many places was thrown up by numbers of some kind of worm, or annelidous animal. How surprising it is that any creatures should be able to exist in brine.

In 1906, E. C. Teodoresco identified a one-celled plant called dunaliella, which most observers concluded must actually be two species because the brine initially developed a green scum and only later, when more dense, turned red. Were there both green and red dunaliella?  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. In fact,  Darwin had figured  out  the  entire  mystery  in the  nineteenth century, but few listened to him until well into the twentieth century.

The San Francisco Bay salt makers of the silver rush days believed the dark red color came from insects in the brine. Only in modern times has it been understood  that dunaliella  is  green, but once the brine reaches a certain level of salinity, it turns red. In addition, tiny, barely visible shrimp, brine shrimp, live in the brine at this density. And there are also salt-loving bacteria of reddish hue that are attracted to brine.

Not only does the red color signal that the brine is ready, it intensifies the solar  heat  and hastens  evaporation,  helping the salt  to  turn to crystals and fall out of the reddish water.

Today, the saltworks of San Francisco Bay sell their reddish little creatures to other saltworks that wish to improve their evaporation process.

Just as Diderot had observed but could not explain, when the brine reaches the density that attracts these shrimp, algae, and bacteria, it means that the brine is at a density close to the point of crystallization.

The process of making salt, though practiced since ancient times, was beginning to be understood.

PART THREE Sodium’s Perfect Marriage

It is an old remark, that all arts and sciences have a mutual dependence upon each other. . . . Thus men, very different in genius and pursuits, become mutually subservient to each other; and a very useful kind of commerce is established by which the old arts are improved, and new ones daily invented.

—William Brownrigg,

The Art of Making

Common Salt, London, 1748

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Odium of Sodium

EDMUND CLERIHEW BENTLEY, a British author of crime novels who lived from 1875 to  1956, wrote  these  lines, it is  said, while  in a chemistry class:

Sir Humphry Davy Abominated gravy.

He lived in odium

Of having discovered sodium.

This  was the  first of a verse  type  known as a clerihew, which is  a pseudo-biographical verse of two rhymed couplets in which the subject’s name makes one of the rhymes. It became a genre of humorous   poetry,   although   not   many  people   can  recite   another example of a clerihew.

Sir  Humphry Davy was  also  an Englishman,  born  in 1778, and a largely self-taught chemist. When he was a twenty-year-old apprentice pharmacist in Cornwall, the Pneumatic Institution of Bristol offered him a  job  researching  medical  uses  of gases,  which  may have  been a twenty-year-old’s  dream  job. There  is  little  evidence  of  his  feelings about gravy, but he was known to have a great fondness for nitrous oxide, laughing gas, which he experimented with at length and found to be not only an enjoyable  recreational drug but a cure  for hangovers. Notable  friends,  including  the  poets  Robert  Southey  and  Samuel Taylor  Coleridge,  shared  in the  experiments.  But  Davy learned  that some gases  are better than others, and he almost died from his experiments with carbon monoxide.

Davy’s work in Bristol came under attack by conservative politicians, including  the  famous  Irish MP Edmund Burke,  who accused  the  gas experiments of promoting not only atheism but the French Revolution.

But within a few years, his other experiments with electrolysis, passing electricity through chemical compounds to break them down, earned him enduring fame. Davy’s chemistry lectures at the Royal Institute became so noted for the brilliance of his delivery that the talks were  regarded  as  fashionable  cultural  events.  Then, in 1812, to  the disappointment of fans, he married a wealthy widow and gave up lecturing to spend his time touring Europe.

Davy, a brilliant scientist, had a flair not only for performance and for living well, but also for self-promotion. He managed to garner credit for a phenomenal number of the scientific breakthroughs of his day. Through electrolysis, he was able to isolate for the first time a number of elements,  including,  in 1807, sodium,  the  seventh  most  common element on earth. This discovery was the first important step toward at last understanding the true nature of salt.

THAT  DIFFERENT   TYPES  of  salt  existed  and  were  suited  for  differentpurposes was a very old idea. The ancient Egyptians knew the difference between sodium chloride and natron. But they didn’t understand  their composition or how to  make them. Saltpeter, which can be  sodium  nitrate  or  potassium  nitrate,  was  well  known by the medieval  Chinese,   who  used  it  for   gunpowder.  After   Europeans learned about gunpowder, the market for potassium nitrate seemed limitless. But little was known about its properties.

As early as the sixteenth century, nitrates were used in cured meats to make them a reddish color, that was thought to be more in keeping with the  natural  color  of meat.  In fifteenth-century Poland,  game  was preserved in nitrate simply by gutting the animal and rubbing the cavity with a blend  of salt  and gunpowder,  which was  potassium  nitrate.  It took centuries of use before anyone understood how potassium nitrate and its cheaper cousin, sodium nitrate, which is often called Chile saltpeter, are broken down by bacteria during the curing of meat. The nitrate  turns  to  nitrite,  which reacts  with a protein in the  meat  called myoglobin, producing a pinkish color. The reaction also produces minuscule  amounts  of something  called  nitrosamines,  which may be cancer-causing. 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.

For centuries, different types of salts were recognized by taste. The Great  Salt  Lake  was  clearly  a  concentration  of  sodium   chloride because  it  had a pleasant salty taste, whereas  the  “bitter  nauseous” taste of the Dead Sea  indicated magnesium chloride. The long practiced principle of evaporating brine was that when brine becomes supersaturated—when it is at least 26 percent salt, which is considerably more than the 2.5 or 3 percent salt of seawater—sodium chloride crystalizes and falls out, or precipitates, from the liquid. But slowly it was discovered that after the sodium chloride, the salt of primary interest, precipitates, a variety of other salts crystalize at even denser saturation.

In 1678, Dr. Thomas Rastel of Droitwich wrote:

Besides  the  white  salt above spoken of we have another sort called  clod  salt,  which adheres  to  the  bottom  of the  vats  and

which after the white salt is laded out, is digged up with a steel picker. This is the strongest salt I have seen and is most used for salting bacon, and neat’s [ox] toungues: it makes the bacon redder than other salt, and makes the fat meat firm.

THE  WORD CHEMISTRY was  first  used  in the  early  1600s, although  the science was not considered an independent field of research until the end of the century. One of the accomplishments of early chemists had been to  identify some of the  salts  that  precipitated  out  of brine.  But despite this work,  it seems that very few people in the seventeenth century had any idea what a salt was.

A  1636 book  by Bernard  Palissy,  with  the  dreamy  title  How to Become Rich and the True Way in Which Every Man in France Could Grow and Multiply Their Treasury and Possessions, statesthat “sugar is  a salt.” In listing  all the  “various  salts,” Palissy includes “grape  salt,  which gives  taste  and flavor  to  wine.”  It  is  not  surprising that  he concluded  that  it  was impossible  to  list  all the  salts.  In John Evelyn’s 1699 discourse on salads, he states that sugar is sometimes referred to as “Indian salt.”

Apparently, there was little definition of salt other than as something made of white crystals. This began to change in the early seventeenth century, when Johann Rudolf Glauber, a German chemist, took a cure in a spring  near  Vienna  and extracted  from the  water  a salt  that  he called sal  mirabile. The salt  was  hydrated  sodium  sulphate,  though Glauber  could  not  have  put  it  that  way, because  Davy had not  yet discovered  sodium.  Glauber  sold  his  discovery  as  a  secret  cure,  a mineral  bath  of  allegedly  wondrous  health  benefits.  It   became  so famous  that today, though it is  more  used in metallurgy, textiles, and other  industries  than  as  a  bath  salt,  it  is  still  commonly  known as Glauber’s salt. Enough of an entrepreneur to keep his formula secret, Glauber was also enough of a scientist to reveal, after his fortune was made,   that   when  sulphuric   acid   was   applied   to   common  salt, producing  hydrochloric  acid,  a  process that had already  been well known for centuries, the residue, that had always been thrown out, was Glauber’s salt.

Later in the same century, Nehemiah Grew, a British plant physiologist who is credited with being the first human ever to witness and document plants having sex, studied the celebrated health spring water of Epsom in Surrey, England. He isolated a salt, magnesium sulphate, ever after known as Epsom salt. Epsom salt is now used not only  medicinally  but in  the  textile  industry,  for  explosives,  in  match heads, and in fireproofing.

But Nehemiah Grew was even less forthcoming than Glauber about his discovery. Only after years of speculation was it discovered by chemist Caspar Neuman in 1715 that Epsom salt could be made by applying sulphuric acid to the mother liquor.

Mother liquor is the dark blood-red water that remains after common salt  precipitates  out  of brine. An eighteenth-century  London chemist named John Brown discovered that Epsom salt could be boiled out of the mother liquor without sulphuric acid. Brown also found another salt in the liquid. The study of this third salt, now known to be magnesium chloride, unleashed a chain of discoveries, including Davy’s 1808 announcement that he had found a new element, magnesium. In 1828, Antoine Bussy isolated workable quantities of the metal, and an industry was born. Magnesium  is  used  to  prevent  corrosion of steel and in explosives, lightbulbs, and lightweight metal alloys.

At the  time  of Neuman’s early-eighteenth-century experiments  with mother  liquor,  the  liquid  was  called  bittern,  and salt  makers  usually threw  it  away or fed  it  to  animals  or even poor people  as  a  cheap source   of  salt.  The  Dutch  found   that  it   worked   well  for  washing windows. Despite  pleas  from scientists, most saltworks  continued  to throw out their leftover bittern.

Then, in  1792, sodium  carbonate,  soda,  was  made  from  mother liquor.  Soda  found  in nature  had been used  since  ancient  times  in early industries such as glassmaking. Natron is a form of soda. In fact, Davy named sodium after soda because  it was one of the element’s best  known compounds. The  manufacture  of  artificial  soda  started numerous  industries.  Sodium  hydrogen  carbonate,  bicarbonate   of soda, is used in food as well as for glassmaking and textiles. Sodium carbonate is used in making paper, plastics, detergents, and the artificial fabric rayon.

By the time of the Civil War, commercially made soda was common, and soda  fountains  had already become  widespread  in America. A popular American women’s magazine gave a recipe for making carbonated drinks.

Put into a tumbler lemon, raspberry, strawberry, pineapple or any other acid syrup, sufficient in quantity to flavor the beverage very highly. Then pour in very cold ice-water  till the glass is half full. Add half a teaspoonful of bicarbonate  of soda (to  be obtained  at the druggist’s)  and  stir  it  well  in  with  a  teaspoon.  It  will   foam  up immediately, and must be drank during the effervescence.

By keeping the syrup and the carbonate of soda in the house, and mixing them as above with ice-water you can at any time have a glass of this very pleasant drink; precisely similar to that which you get  at  the  shops. The cost  will  be  infinitely  less.—Godey’s Lady’s Book, 1860

For many centuries there had been a great confusion between potash and soda. The name potash is derived from the process used for making potassium carbonate, cooking down water and wood ash in earthen  pots.  Like  soda, potash  had many industrial  applications long before it was chemically understood. Among other things, it was used in making glass and soap.

Before sodium carbonate in the form of baking soda was manufactured, potash was  used  in  baking. Amelia  Simmon’s cookbook, originally published in Hartford and then Albany in 1796, is considered the first American cookbook not only because  it was published after the Revolution, but because  it was written by an American, for Americans. Simmons used enormous quantities for apparently huge cakes.  One recipe,  for “Independence  cake,”  called for twenty pounds of flour, fifteen pounds of sugar, ten pounds of butter, and twenty-four  eggs.  Many of her  baking  recipes  called  for  “pearl- ash,” which was potash, as a rising agent.

HONEY CAKE

Six pound flour, 2 pound honey, 1 pound sugar, 2 ounces cinnamon, 1 ounce ginger,

a little orange peel, 2 tea spoons pearl-ash, 6 eggs; dissolve the pearl-ash in milk,

put the whole together, moisten with milk  if necessary, bake 20 minutes.—Amelia

Simmons, American Cookery, 1796

In 1807, when the potash industry was already many centuries old, Davy connected a piece of potash to the poles of a battery and caused the  release  of a metal at  the  negative  pole. According  to  his  cousin Edmund, Davy began dancing  around the  room  in ecstasy,  realizing that he had isolated another element. He named his newly discovered metal potassium after potash.

UNTIL  THE  LATE eighteenth  century,  bleaching  was  accomplished  by soaking fabric in buttermilk and then laying it out on the ground to be whitened in sunlight for weeks. These areas, known as bleach fields, took  up enormous  spreads  of land.  The nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution created  a far greater  demand for both soap  and bleach. Industry was blackening entire cities, and as skies—and clothes— became covered with soot, it was becoming difficult to find enough space for bleach fields in urban areas.

Another self-taught chemist, a Swede named Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in 1774, twelve years before his celebrated discovery of oxygen, first described a substance called chlorine and noted that it had the ability to  bleach.  Scheele  was also  one of the  first  to  study the  fermenting attributes of lactic acid.

But it was not until 1786, ten years after Scheele’s observations on chlorine, that a practical application was pursued by the great French chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet, who showed that chlorine, when absorbed in potash, created a liquid bleach. Yet another salt-based industry was founded. In little more than a year, industrial bleaching became a major activity in the British textile industry.

In 1810, Davy isolated chlorine and proved that it too was an element, a greenish gas which he named for the Greek word for greenish yellow.

Chlorine   has  become  an  important  industry.  Not  only  used  for bleach, water treatment, and sewage  treatment, it is also an ingredient in  plastics   and  artificial  rubber.  And,  as  with  so  many scientific

discoveries, a military application was found. Chlorine  was the  basis for gas warfare. In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, chlorine gas was exploded in canisters, but later in the war, artillery shells filled with carbonyl chloride proved to be more effective. Known as mustard gas, the compound is credited with 800,000 casualties.

CHEMISTS AND ENTREPRENEURS were beginning to understand that “salt” was one of a very specific group of substances that were often found together and that what we now call “common salt” was in many ways the least valuable of the group. In 1744, Guillaume François Rouelle, a member of the French Royal Academy of Sciences, wrote a definition of  a  salt  that  has  endured.  He said  that  a  salt  was  any substance caused  by the  reaction of an acid  and a base.  For  a long  time,  the existence of acids and bases had been known but little understood. Acids  were  sour tasting  and had the  ability to  dissolve  metal. Bases felt  soapy. But  Rouelle  understood  that  an acid  and a base  have a natural affinity for each other because nature seeks completion and, as with all good couples, acids and bases  make each other more complete. Acids search for an electron that they lack, and bases  try to shed an extra one. Together they make a well-balanced compound, a salt. In common salt the  base,  or electron donor, is  sodium, and the acid, or electron recipient, is chloride.

It turned out that salt was a microcosm for one of the oldest concepts of nature and the order of the universe. From the fourth-century-B.C. Chinese belief in the forces of yin and yang, to most of the world’s religions, to modern science, to the basic principles of cooking, there has always been a belief that two opposing forces find completion— one recieving a missing part and the other shedding an extra one. A salt is a small but perfect thing.

MUCH OF THE new interest in salt, like  the  early Chinese  experiments with  saltpeter,  was  focused  on providing  the  military  with ever  more efficient ways to blow up people and things. In the nineteenth century, it was discovered that potassium chlorate produced a bigger explosion than traditional gunpowder, potassium nitrate. And magnesium had even more impressive explosive properties.

This  science  gave  birth  to  a  broad  range  of  industries,  some  of which also poisoned people. The Leblanc process, invented by eighteenth-century French surgeon Nicolas  Leblanc, treated  salt  with sulfuric acid to produce sodium carbonate. Along the way, it also gave off hydrogen chloride  fumes  and solid  calcium sulphide. The calcium sulphide released the classic “rotten egg” smell of sulfur to add to the black clouds and cinder of industrial centers. Hydrogen chloride fumes were worse.

The  gas  from  these  manufactories  is  of  such  a  deleterious nature as to blight anything within its influence, and is alike baneful to health and property. The herbage in the fields in their vicinity   is   scorched,   the   gardens   yield   neither   fruit    nor vegetables;  many flourishing  trees  have  lately  become  rotten naked sticks. Cattle and poultry droop and pine away. It tarnishes the furniture in our houses, and when we are exposed to  it,  which  is  of  frequent  occurrence,  we  are  afflicted  with

coughs and pains in the head.—hearings at the town council of

Newcastle upon Tyne, January 9, 1839

Saltworks, once contaminated by coal smoke and pan scale, expanded their  line  of products  and became  far more  toxic.  By the

1880s, the age of canals had come to an end with the development of railroads, and salt was no longer profitable  in upstate  New York. But salt was used to manufacture soda ash, caustic soda, bicarbonate of soda, and other chemicals. The salt center of Syracuse was turned into a chemical  manufacturing  center,  temporarily saving  the  industry but nearly    destroying    Lake   Onondaga with   pollution.   Chlorine   is   a component of some of the deadliest industrial pollutants, including polychlorinated  biphenyls,  which are  more  infamously known by their abbreviation, PCBs.

On May 15, 1918, the  section  of the  Erie  Canal  that  ran through Syracuse was closed. Five years later, the city bought the canal property for $800,000 and covered  it  over,  creating  Erie  Boulevard.

Soon even the salt industry vanished. In the 1930s, the saltworks were cleared  away, and the  city struggled  to  clean up the  lake  so that the area could be used for recreation.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Mythology of Geology

CHEMISTRY CHANGED FOREVER the way we see salt. But it was inventions in other fields that radically changed the role of salt in the world.

Salt for food  will never become completely obsolete. But since  the beginning  of  the  Industrial  Revolution  it  has  steadily  become  less important.

The  first  blow  was  from  a  Paris  cook  named  Nicolas  Appert.

Considering the significance of his invention, little is known of Appert.

Some  think   his   first  name  may  have  been  François. He  was  a confectioner  who believed that sealing food tightly in a jar and then heating the jar would destroy the substance that caused  food to rot, a substance that he termed ferment.

Among the first salt fish customers to be lost to Appert’s ideas was Napoleon’s navy. In 1803, Appert persuaded the navy to try his broth, beef, and vegetables  all preserved  in glass  jars  by his  heating  and sealing  process. The navy was pleased. A report stated, “The beans and green peas, both with and without meat, have all the freshness and flavor of hand-picked vegetables.”

Anyone who has ever  eaten  canned beans  or peas  may suspect some hyperbole here, but for sailors who had never had vegetables on their long voyages, Appert’s treats seemed a wondrous invention. Grimod  de La Reynière, the leading gastronomic  writer of France  at the time, praised Appert’s food.

Appert’s 1809 book, The Art of Preserving All Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years , was widely read and even translated into English. Only months after its publication, Peter Durand, a Londoner,  was granted  a patent  for preserving  food.  He admitted that  his  ideas  came  from an unnamed foreigner,  who was  probably Appert. Actually, in 1807, an Englishman named Thomas Saddington had  demonstrated  a  similar  process.  But  what  is  important  about Durand is that along with glass and pottery, he mentioned in his list of possible containers for preserved foods “tin and other metals.”

Bryan   Donkin,   a   visionary   early   British   industrialist,   realized, perhaps better than Durand had, the potential of the tin idea. He had founded the Dartford Iron Works, and, in 1805, he helped finance the first industrial papermaking machine. After Durand received his patent in 1809, Donkin founded  Donkin,  Hall, and Gamble,  the  first  British canning plant, across the Thames from the City of London.  It became the outfitter of famous expeditions such as the arctic expeditions of William Edward Parry in the 1820s.

Toward  the  end of  the  Napoleonic  Wars,  the  British  navy began experimenting  with  canned food  from  Donkin,  Hall, and Gamble. At first, canned food was used as special provisions for those on sick list, but by the 1830s, it had become part of general provisions. Unfortunately, the can opener had not yet been invented. Sailors were issued special knives with which to pry open the cans.

In 1830, a canning plant was built in La Turballe, the sardine fishing town across the opening of the Guérande swamp from Le Croisic. The plant flourished, and gradually most of the area’s salt fish business collapsed, unable to compete with canned products. In time, much of the French Atlantic salt fish industry disappeared. A similar fate befell much of the salted herring industry to the north and anchovy industry to the south.

A TWENTIETH-CENTURY invention dealt an even worse blow to the salt fish industry and, for that matter, to fish. The idea of using cold to preserve food had been much thought about in the nineteenth century. In 1800, Thomas Moore, an American engineer who wanted to keep his butter cool during the twenty-mile journey between his Maryland farm and the market in Washington, D.C., the newly created capital, built a wooden box with a metal  butter  container  inside  surrounded  by ice.  He then stuffed the box with rabbit fur. According to his account, his butter, firm and chilled even in summer, sold well in Washington.

As early as the 1820s, fish was sometimes packed in ice in an attempt    to    preserve    its    freshness.    American    farmers    asked

themselves  if  ice  could  not  somehow be  used  like  salt.  “Salting  in snow”  was  discussed   by  Sarah  Josepha  Hale.  As  the   editor  of

Godey’s Lady’s Book from 1837 to  1877—years  in which this  widely

read  magazine  almost  never  mentioned  the  Civil  War  because  war

was  not   the   business   of  ladies—Hale   was  regarded   as   one  of

America’s most influential women.

An excellent way to keep fresh meat during the winter, is practiced by the farmers in the country, which they term “salting in snow.”  Take a large clean tub, cover the bottom three or four inches thick with clean snow; then lay pieces of fresh meat, spare ribs, fowls, or whatever you wish to keep, and cover each layer with two or three inches of snow, taking particular care to fill snow into every cranny and crevice between the pieces, and around the edges of the tub. Fowl must also be filled inside with the  snow. When the  tub  is  filled, the  last  layer  must  be snow, pressed down tight; then cover the tub, which must be kept in a cold place, the colder the better. The meat will not freeze, and unless  there  happen to  be a long  spell  of warm  weather,  the snow will not thaw, but the meat remain as fresh and juicy when

it is taken out to be cooked, as when it was first killed.—Sarah

Josepha Hale, The Good Housekeeper, 1841

An eccentric New Yorker named Clarence Birdseye was troubled by the  idea  of  packing  food  in  ice,  because   the  ice  melted  and  the resulting water created an environment in which bacteria could flourish. Bored  with  New York office  jobs,  Birdseye  had moved to  Labrador with his wife, Eleanor, and their son to earn his living trapping furs. He noted, as was long known by the indigenous people there, that when fish are caught in Labrador in the wintertime, they instantly freeze, and that  if  kept  this  way for  several  weeks,  when thawed  they  will taste fresh.

The Birdseye home became very different from other Labrador households. Cabbages were frozen in the windows, and fish were swimming in the bathtub, as Birdseye experimented. He observed how the harsh Labrador wind acted on wet food, freezing it very rapidly so

that bacteria had no opportunity to develop. Soon he was in Washington, unveiling his new technology, the fast-freezing process. Birdseye went to the unveiling equipped with a block of ice, a fan, and a bucket of brine—all the necessary ingredients for a homemade Labrador winter. He made the brine from calcium chloride, which, after experimentation, he found kept the temperature lower than sodium chloride.

Fast freezing worked, Birdseye discovered, because  of a principle every salt maker knew: Rapid crystallization creates small crystals, and slow crystallization produces  large  ones. Because  the  ice  crystals  in rapidly frozen  food  were  small,  they did  not  interfere  with  the  tissue structure and so better preserved the food in its original state.

In 1925, Birdseye moved to Gloucester, Massachusetts, the leading New England cod-fishing port, and established a frozen seafood company. Birdseye’s  invention came at a time  when the  demand for salted fish was in rapid decline in both the United States and Britain. The railroad, faster transportation, and better market systems had introduced  more  people  to  fresh fish. By 1910, only 1 percent of the fish landed in New England was cured with salt.

By 1928, 1 million pounds of food  frozen in the  Birdseye  method was being sold in the United States. Most of it was being sold by Birdseye, who managed to find a buyer for his company just before the

1929 market crash. The company became  General Foods, modeling the  name after General Electric  and General Motors, leaders  in their respective industries. Birdseye 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.” By the time he died at age sixty-nine, he had patented  250 inventions  including  dozens of devices  and gadgets  to improve the operation of his frozen-food process. He invented a lightbulb with a built-in reflector and a gooseneck lamp. But he will always be remembered for frozen food.

Fast freezing had 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.

THE AGE OF industrial engineering  brought inventions  to  a salt industry that had been slow to  develop  new ideas. Most saltworks  had been started as small operations by individualists who found original solutions to their technical problems. Some ideas, like the natural gas of Sichuan, had enduring and far-reaching applications. Some ideas, such as little paddle wheels with bells in the freshwater canals of Lorraine  saltworks,  to  ensure  by their  tintinnabulation that  the  canals were  not mixing with brine  canals, were  purely local. Still other ideas were  based  on cheap—often family—labor. One of the  more  curious

examples  of this  was the grau, a sixteenth-century machine  for lifting brine from storage tanks by means of a basket on one end of a lever.

On the other end were ropes. Women would grab the ropes and swing off them like children at an amusement park, their weight hoisting the buckets on the other end.

Another example, using cheap labor, in this case  slave labor, was a

human-powered wheel used to  pump brine. In medieval Salsomaggiore, men, chained at the neck, walked on the slats of huge wheels as on a treadmill. In Halle, brine was lifted on a wheel powered by twelve men. The man-wheel was used in Europe until the nineteenth century.   In  1840,  a  twenty-eight-pond   saltworks   near   Cape   Ann, Massachusetts, supplemented the power from windmills on calm days by pumping brine by means of a fifteen-foot-in-diameter, five-foot-wide wheel with buckets on its outer rim. The wheel was powered by a large bull that walked inside the wheel.

Pumping brine was one of the most important engineering problems confronting  salt  makers,  and  it  inspired  many inventions.  The  first

engine, the steam engine, which led the way to the Industrial Revolution, was invented in 1712  by  an  Englishman, Thomas Newcomen, and used exclusively for pumping water. The engine and its subsequent improvements were embraced by British and American salt makers, who had abundant fuel, mostly coal. In Germany, however, where there was not enough sunlight for solar evaporation and most of the springs had relatively weak brine, the  cost of fuel was the  central problem. In the seventeenth century, the Germans, learning that the salt at Salsomaggiore was more profitable than that in Germany, had sent investigators to Parma, convinced they would find new fuel- economizing technology. Instead they found that the Parmigianos simply  charged  a  great  deal  more  for  their  salt.  For  the  Germans, steam engines consumed too much fuel.

SALT   INSPIRED   INNOVATIONS in  transportation,  perhaps  none  more impressive than the canals of northern Germany, Cheshire, and the United States. The Anderton boat lift lowered entire loaded salt barges fifty feet from the Cheshire canal system down to the level of the River Weaver, which ran into  the  mouth of the  Mersey across the  bay from Liverpool. Built in 1875 to link the Trent and Mersey Canal to the River Weaver,  it  originally  lowered  the  barges  by a  cantilevered  hydraulic system based  on counterweights and water power. But salt spills eventually turned the canal brackish and corroded the machine. In the twentieth century, an electric motor was added.

But it was in the technology of drilling, that salt producers had a momentous impact on the modern world. For a long time, the percussion drilling techniques of the Chinese were the leading invention. All percussion drilling, from early Sichuan to nineteenth- century Kanawha, essentially consisted  of a chisel  with  a long  shaft being whacked by a kind of hammer. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europeans began using a rotary drill. They attached extension  rods,  known as  boring  rods,  which,  in 1640, enabled  the Dutch to  drill 216 feet  under Amsterdam  to  reach a source  of fresh water.

In the  early nineteenth century,  the  drilling proved  so successful  at Kanawha that many Americans began deep-drilling projects in search of salt. An improved connection between the driving shaft and the drill shaft was developed in the United States; this connection was called a jar because  it was designed to better withstand the jar of the pounding shaft. Europeans quickly adopted the American invention. Jars had actually been used centuries earlier by the Chinese, but westerners did not  know this.  At  the  time  of  the  American  invention  of  the  jar,  a western missionary, one Father Imbert, had gone to China to study the ancient  wells  of  Sichuan.  He reported  on more  than  1,000 ancient

wells drilled to great depths and brine lifted in long bamboo buckets. He also observed that the Chinese had elaborate techniques for recovering  broken  drill shafts.  In  the  West,  such obstructions  were often the cause of a well being abandoned.

IN THE LATE seventeenth century, when coal prospectors drilled into the Cheshire  earth and found  rock salt, it was the  scientists, not the  salt merchants, who were excited by the find.  It demonstrated how improved  drilling  might  someday open up an entirely  new scientific field—geology,  the  study of the  earth. Almost  another  century and a half would  pass  before  England  had its  first systematic  curriculum  in the study of geology—established not by a geologist but by Humphry Davy.

Long before there were geologists, there were natural philosophers who contemplated the structure of the earth. Some of their best ideas remained unproved and unembraced. Nineteen hundred years before Columbus’s voyages, Aristotle wrote that the earth was round. An eleventh-century-A.D. Persian physician, Avicenna, author of some 100 works on medicine and philosophy, wrote about land being formed by prehistoric flooding, erosion, sediment deposits, and the metamorphosis of soft rock. He might have been remembered as the father of geology if more people had understood what he was talking about. But it would  take  centuries  for the  scientific  world to  catch up with him.

Throughout the Renaissance, new ideas were presented on the earth’s  formation by thinkers  in various  fields, including  Leonardo  da Vinci, who opined that fossils were not, as widely supposed, placed in the  rock by the  devil but were  formed  by trapped  plants  and animals metamorphosing in the soil.

In the  mid–sixteenth century, Georg  Bauer, a German with the  pen name Georgius Agricola, wrote  on the  origin of mountains, minerals,

and underground water. His 1556 work De re metallica was the most

complete  work  to  date  and for centuries  to  come on techniques  for

mining and producing metals and minerals, including salt.

Long before it was called geology, a number of geological debates

persisted. One of them was on the origin of salt. Was a giant bed of salt at the bottom of the sea keeping ocean water salted? Or, as some believed,  did  the  tremendous  pressure  at  great  depths  so  squeeze water  that it  turned  salty? Another  theory held  that salt did  not come from the ocean at all, but that salt on earth was carried to sea by rivers. In  the  seventeenth  century,  René  Descartes  asserted  that  sweet water was soft and would evaporate, but salt particles were hard and would remain, and that was why the sea  remained salty. According to his theory, the soft part of the ocean, the freshwater, was absorbed in the earth’s pores and then reappeared in the form of freshwater rivers, streams, and lakes. The earth not only had pores, but also had cracks, and these fissures were wide enough to let in the seawater, particles and all. This seawater usually formed brine springs. But some of these fissures  were  dead ends and did  not  lead  to  springs.  The seawater that seeped into such places hardened into rock salt.

One eighteenth century theory held  that the  source  of natural brine was  that  gypsum saturated  with  seawater  leached  salt.  But  another theory was that gypsum, a soft mineral common  in most of the world, turned  into  salt.  Water,  according  to  this  hypothesis,  is  salty  in  its natural state. The real question was: What caused freshwater not to be salty?

Robert  Hooke, the  seventeenth-century  philosopher  whose  many scientific  accomplishments  include  originating  the  word cel l for  the basic   organism,   concluded   that   salt   came   from   the   air.   Others concluded that salt came from alkali, which turns out to be true, since alkali  are  bases.  Some  combined  the two,  concluding  that  salt  was caused by the alkali in seawater mixing with the salt in the air.

The Germans tried to understand their many brine springs. Did brine come from rock  salt  below,  as  already appeared  to  be the  case  in Cheshire?    Christian   Keferstein,    a   Prussian   lawyer,    self-taught scientist, and author of a seven-volume geologic study, was convinced that  the  discovery  of rock  salt  near  a  number  of brine  springs  was coincidental. Rock salt, he believed, came from certain rocks.

In  the  eighteenth  and  nineteenth  centuries,  the  raging  geologic debate  pitted  neptunism  against  plutonism.  The  neptunists,  led  by German  mineralogist  Abraham  Gottlob Werner,  believed   that  the source  of  all  bedrock  was  a  common ancient  sea.  According  to plutonism,  most  rock had hardened  from a huge molten rock mass. Neptunism held that salt came from the sea, and plutonism insisted it was volcanic in origin.

In 1775, William Bowles used the salt mountain of Cardona to argue against the neptunism theory of salt. Logic indicated that such a huge mountain of solid rock was probably not left over from the ocean. Several others confirmed that this Pyrenees-sized mountain was solid salt or mostly salt—70 percent, one study contended—and that such a mass must have metamorphosized out of other rock. Eventually, neptunism was rejected, because  both granite and basalt were proved to  be  of volcanic  origin. But  did  that  mean that  plutonism  was  right about salt being formed by volcanos?

In  the  nineteenth  century,  Europeans  became  extremely  curious about the structure of salt deposits in other parts of the world, such as the Dead Sea.  Thomas Jefferson was constantly questioned by Europeans about American salt formations, some of them mythical structures rumored to exist in the wilderness of the northern reaches of the Louisiana Purchase.

As drilling improved, it became clear that the earth possessed  huge underground salt deposits, and that far from being rare, rock salt was very common. By the  end of the  eighteenth century, many geologists were   convinced   that   most   of   central   Europe   was sitting   on  an enormous  salt deposit. To a large  extent, they were  right. The same salt deposit that feeds Alsace and Lorraine extends through Germany to the Austrian Salzkammergut. The thick layer of salt underneath Cheshire starts in Northern Ireland and runs into northern Europe. Onondaga County,  New York,  is  part  of an enormous  salt  field  that stretches across the entire Great Lakes region, providing rock salt mines under the city of Detroit, in Cleveland, and in Ontario.

There is still not complete agreement on the formation of many of the earth’s great salt deposits. But they are generally agreed to have had their origin in oceans rather than volcanos, though there is still no set explanation for the saltiness of the sea.

Geologists, both out of curiosity and in search of salt, looked for salt domes, areas  like Avery Island  that  had deep  pure  sodium  chloride

deposits forced by the pressure of shifting plates to mushroom up from the depths and break the earth’s surface in a dome shape. The history of salt dome theories begins with Thomassy, the Frenchman who said that Avery Island  was rock salt. He stated  that the  salt there  “comes from a volcano of water, mud, and gas.” This plutonistic theory of the salt’s volcanic origin was later rejected by most geologists.

In 1867, C. A. Goesmann, reporting to the American Bureau of Mines,  theorized  that  the  salt  under Avery Island  resulted  from brine springs ascending through older deposits of bedded salt. According to Goesmann, brine rises from deep within the earth, moving through the earth’s fissures and crystallizing near the surface.

Salt  prospectors  were  able  to  find  salt  domes by recognizing  the rounded  shape that protruded  above the  earth’s  surface. They would drill in such spots, which invariably yielded brine, but often the salt was so  contaminated  with  blackish  muck that  it  was  of little  commercial value.

In 1901, two  men, Pattillo  Higgins  and Anthony Lucas, ignored  the advice of geologists and started drilling a Texas salt dome called Spindletop. No one ever looked at salt domes the same way again. No

longer were terms like well and drill rig to conjure up the image of salt.

Spindletop had spawned the age of petroleum.

Such  an  age   had  been  promised   in   1859,  outside   Titusville, Pennsylvania,    where    Edwin    Drake,    after    studying    the    drilling techniques  of  salt  producers,  drilled  69.5  feet  and,  to  everyone’s surprise  but  his,  hit oil.  He began producing  twenty-five  barrels  per day, and many started  to  believe  that oil would  be an abundant U.S. resource. But subsequent drilling, mostly in the East, yielded little.

By 1866, seven years  after Titusville, when salt was discovered  in Ontario, it was a different age. Canada  had not produced  much salt, but instead  of excitement about a rich new salt field, there  were  high hopes  that  oil  had been found.  In  Goderich,  Ontario,  Samuel  Platt organized  the  Goderich  Petroleum  Company, which  began work  on the  north  bank of the  Maitland  River—drilling  686 feet  through  gray limestone.  There  was  no sign  of oil,  and the  stockholders  who had provided  $10,000 in start-up  money wanted  to  abandon the  project.

But  the  county council  offered  Platt  a bonus of $1,000, and the  city offered $500 provided he continue to a depth of 1,000 feet. At 964 feet from the collar of the hole, he hit solid rock salt.

The Goderich Salt Company was founded with fifty-two boiling kettles, and the Ontario salt fields have become one of the most productive saltworks in the modern world.

BY THE TIME Higgins and Lucas began drilling at Spindletop, hopes for American oil had faded. But Spindletop changed the thinking of geologists, chemists, engineers, and economists  because  it showed that  a  single  spot,  a  corner  of  a  single  salt  dome, could  by itself produce enormous quantities of oil in a short period of time. In its first sixty-five  years,  Spindletop  produced  145 million barrels  of oil. As a result of Spindletop, the  United  States surpassed  Russia, the  largest oil producer at the time.

Also because  of Spindletop, geologists took a new look at salt domes. 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. The

2,000-year-old mystery of Sichuan was answered.

After  Spindletop,  more  oil  was  found  along  the  Texas-Louisiana coast  in  such places  as  Sour  Lake  in  1902, Humble  in  1905, and Goose  Creek  in 1908. The United  States  took  the  lead  in a drilling technology that was now in demand all over the  world, as geologists searched  the  globe  for likely salt  domes to  drill. Many of them  were found in the Persian Gulf. In 1908, oil was found in Persia, now Iran, in the places where Herodotus had written about salt.

Exploration  continued  in  North America.  Few believed  Columbus Joiner  when he  began  drilling   for  oil  on an  unheard-of  geologic structure  he  called  “the  Overton  anticline.”  It  is  now known that  his theory of geology was completely wrong. But fortunately, at the time, no one could disprove it. They laughed at him, and he drilled anyway and found the largest oil field in North America, the East Texas Field.

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.

As Brownrigg had predicted in the mid-eighteenth century, "Old arts are  improved   and  new  ones  daily  invented."  The  quest  for  salt  had tumed unexpected  corners and created  dozens of industries.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Soil Never Sets On . . .

WHEN THE BRITISH Empire  was at  its  height,  “Liverpool salt”  was the salt of the empire, a prestigious product known all over the world. As in Cardona, Hallein, and Wieliczka, a visit to the Cheshire salt mines was a special treat for visiting aristocrats. These elite guests were lowered into the mines in enormous brine buckets. The candlelit bucket passed through the narrow shaft and when it came out at the mine below, the visitors were greeted by the word welcome spelled out by the workers with candles on the salt floor. According to local legend, when the czar of Russia visited England, he dined beneath Cheshire by the “light of a thousand candles.”

It  was  the  canals  leading  to  Liverpool  that  had given  Cheshire  a global market. Not only was salt ballast for the  voyage to America  to pick up cotton and other imports for British industry, but, because  the port of Liverpool was deeply involved in the slave trade, ships regularly bound for  West  Africa  needed  an outbound cargo.  Nigeria  bought Cheshire salt until 1968, when that market collapsed with the Biafran civil war.

By 1890, besides the lucrative foreign market, Cheshire supplied 90 percent  of British salt.  In Cheshire,  a good income  could  be had by anyone who could  buy or lease  a small  plot  of land  near  one of the wiches and who had the  relatively small amount of capital needed to drill a hole in that ground and set up some wide, flat iron pans over a coal-burning furnace.

Because  the chimneys at Cheshire brine works were not built high enough for  the  wind  to  carry  the  soot  and  glowing  cinders  away, workers   and  townspeople   lived   amid burning   black   clouds—“the smoke and smother of weary Winsford,” as one newspaper described it in  the  1880s. An 1878 royal commission reported  that air pollution was choking the  local  vegetation.  Salt  producers  were  fined  for the pollution,  but  this  did  not  alter  their  practices.  One producer  told  a board of inquiry that he would continue until the fines drove him out of business, and then he would relocate elsewhere.

Salt did not provide an easy life. Often a man would rent a pan, and he, his wife, and children would ensure the maximum profit by working around-the-clock   shifts   to   keep   the   pan  in   constant   production. Children  would  start  working  at  the  salt  pans  at  the  age  of  nine. Women would go back and forth between the pans and their homes, alternating  household  work with salt making. A normal workday for a salaried  salt  worker was twelve  hours,  but  it  was often much longer. Some  were  paid  by the  hour and others  by the  quantity of salt  they produced.

Reform came slowly. An 1867 law forbade  women and children to work between 6 P.M. and 6 A.M. Factory inspectors began protesting the working  conditions  for  women, saying  the  work  was  too  physically strenuous. And the public was scandalized when inspectors revealed that in the  hot boiling  houses, men and women worked  together, the men stripped  to  the  waist and the  women, dresses removed, in their underwear and petticoats.

An 1876 inquiry demanded that girls under eighteen be barred from saltworks. Robert Baker, one of the inspectors, argued for shorter workweeks for men. He told the board of inquiry, “The  fact is the men never see beds but on Saturday night.”

FOR CENTURIES, NANTWICH had been the leading Cheshire salt town. But in the early twentieth century, geologists discovered that the most important  deposits  were  under  Northwich  and Winsford,  where  the thickness  of  the  rock  salt  is  as  much as  180 feet  and even at  its thinnest, no less than 48 feet.

The strange  sinkholes  that had been sporadically appearing  in the eighteenth century had become by the late nineteenth century a regular phenomenon—not so much in Nantwich, but in and around Northwich and Winsford. Every year new spots in meadows, pastures, and even towns collapsed. The holes caught rainfall and made small lakes. Toward the end of the century, a lake of more than 100 acres suddenly appeared  near  Northwich.  Sometimes  saltworks  made  use  of  the newly developed  holes,  filling  them  with  ash or lime  waste,  just  one more pollutant in an area black with coal smoke.

The brine makers tried to continue blaming the sinkholes on the rock salt  miners,  saying  sinking  was  caused  by abandoned mine  shafts. This had worked better when rock salt was a new discovery. But in the nineteenth century, it became obvious that the location of the sinkholes bore no relation to the location of mine shafts, and as sinking became more frequent, there were not enough shafts to explain the number of occurrences. On the other hand, there was an exact correlation between   the   increase   in   brine   production   and  the   increase   in sinkholes.

Northwich

The sinking was starting to wreak havoc with railroad lines and even to  threaten bridges. In Northwich and Winsford, homes and buildings collapsed  as  the  ground  gave  way underneath  them.  By 1880, 400 buildings had been destroyed or damaged in Northwich alone. At Winsford, a new church was condemned as dangerous. Water mains, sewer lines, and gas pipes were continually breaking, and the costs of repairing them were draining municipal budgets. Shop after shop was condemned and torn down.

A passing traveler described Northwich:

A number  of miniature  valleys  seem to  cross  the  road  and in their  immediate  neighborhood  the  houses are,  many of them, far out of the perpendicular. Some overhang the street as much as two feet, whilst others lean on their neighbors and push them over.   Chimney-stacks   lean   and  become   dangerous;   whilst doors  and windows  refuse  to  open and close  properly. Many panes of glass are broken in the windows; the walls exhibit cracks from the smallest size up to a width of three or four inches;   and  in  the   case   of  brick   arches   over   doors   and passages, the key brick has either fallen out or is about to do so, and in many cases  short beams have been substituted for the  usual  arch.  In the  inside,  things  are  not  much better.  The ceilings are cracked and the cornices fall down; whilst the plaster on the walls and the paper covering it, exhibit manifold chinks  and crevices.  The doors  either  refuse  to  open without being  continually altered  by the  joiner, or they swing  back into the room the moment they are unlatched.—Chamber’s Journal, 1879

With an English flair  for genteel  euphemism,  the  growing  disaster was  labeled subsidence. Subsidence  in Cheshire  was  becoming  a subject   of   considerable   amusement   around   England,   spawning Cheshire   jokes.  But  it   also   drew  religious  fanatics,  who  went  to Cheshire to deliver sermons to the crowds who came to gawk at the holes. The preachers  would  stand  at the  edge  of the  craters  looking down into akimbo boiling houses and broken smokestacks and warn that this was what hell would look like.

The truth was  that  too  much brine  was  being  pumped too  rapidly from    underneath   Cheshire.   Hundreds    of   ambitious    small-scale entrepreneurs were making salt. They became extremely competitive.

Some would pump additional brine out and dump  it in the canals just to try to deprive their competitors.

The brine  that  flows  over  the  salt  rock  of Cheshire  is  a saturated solution—one  quarter  salt—and  so  it  is  incapable  of absorbing  any more.  But  as  brine  was  removed,  fresh  groundwater  took  its  place, and this water would  absorb  salt until the  brine  was once again one-fourth  salt.  The  problem  was  that  if  large  quantities  of  brine  were

removed,  they were  replaced  with large  quantities  of freshwater  that hungrily  absorbed  considerable  amounts  of  salt.  Once  that  started happening,  the  freshwater  began eroding  the  natural  salt  pillars  that supported  the  space  between the  salt rock and the  surface. When a pillar collapsed, the earth above it sank.

But   even   in   the   nineteenth   century,   when  this   process   was understood, it was difficult to know whom to blame. The area around a saltworks  might  remain  solid  even though  the  brine  it  was  pumping was causing the earth to collapse four miles away. Two or three other saltworks, though closer to the hole than the culprit, might have caused no damage at all.

Identifying the culprit was an important legal issue, since hundreds of people,  many of them  not  in the  salt  industry,  had lost  their  property and were  demanding  compensation.  Unable  to  name a  defendant, they could not pursue a legal action. Could they charge the salt industry in  general?   Citizens   formed   committees   and  went  to   Parliament proposing a bill that compensated victims for the damages caused by the  salt  industry.  Property owners,  citing  a long-standing  principle  of British law that the owner  of land owned the subsoil, claimed that not only was their property being destroyed, but they were being robbed of the rock salt that they owned. The brine pumpers were sucking up their

rock salt from under their own sinking property.

The salt producers argued, with typical nineteenth-century capitalist confidence,  that  the  locals  were  already  being  compensated  by the economic  benefits  of  having  the  salt  industry.  They denied  that  the subsidence was caused by pumping, insisting that the sinkholes were a  natural  phenomenon that  would  continue  even  without  pumping.

These arguments prevailed, and, in 1880, the bill was defeated.

IN   1887,  A group  of  London financiers  raised  £4  million  to  buy up saltworks for a company called the Salt Union Limited. The company, founded  by seven entrepreneurs  without prior connections  to  the  salt industry, wanted  to  buy up all British salt production and become the largest industrial company in England. Both the London Times and the Economist warned that such a giant could not maintain a monopoly on an industry whose raw material was so common and initial investment requirements so modest.

In Cheshire, with its long tradition of individualists and small private operators, many were angered at the sight of a corporate giant buying out local salt makers one by one. But industry leaders felt that the Salt Union  was   a  workable   solution   to   a  sector   that   had  too   many participants.  The rate  of brine  pumping  spurred  by this  competition was in danger of literally sinking them all. The low salt prices of the late 1880s gave a further incentive to selling out.

Sixty-five  salt  producers  sold  out  to  the  Salt  Union.  They were  not only  from  Cheshire  but  from  neighboring  Staffordshire, Worcestershire, northeastern England, and Northern Ireland. The Salt Union had cornered 85 percent of British salt production. But most analysts believed that it had greatly overpaid to acquire these companies.

Nevertheless, the  company was highly profitable  its first few years, before  going  into  a  steep  decline.  Not  until  1920 did  profits  again reach the level of 1890.

In 1891, when the  Cheshire  Salt Districts Compensation Bill again came before  Parliament, the  Salt Union used the  arguments  that the independent salt producers had used a decade earlier: that the people were  being  compensated  by the  economic  benefits  of having  a salt industry  and that  the  sinking  was  a  natural  phenomenon that  would have occurred  without  saltworks.  But  now the  Salt  Union provided  a target, a single  entity that was clearly responsible—a  defendant. The local  citizenry  spent  a  fortune  promoting  the  bill,  and both  the  Salt Union and its shareholders spent a fortune fighting it. It passed, though, and within ten years  the  Salt Union itself was applying  for damages, saying its properties had suffered subsidence from the pumping of others.

In the long run, the Compensation Act probably helped the Salt Union.   It   created   the   Cheshire   Brine   Subsidence   Compensation Board, which was financed by a flat tax on salt producers. The cost of the  tax  was  onerous  for  small  operations  and insignificant  for  large ones. The small-scale producers regarded the Brine Board, as it was known, as another attempt by big salt to drive them out.

The Brine Board established a building code that had to be followed for new buildings to be eligible for compensation. The collapsing towns were  rebuilt in the  old Tudor style, with each new house resting  on a timber  frame  that  had built-in anchors  for the  placement  of hydraulic jacks  powerful  enough to  lift  sinking  buildings.  An eighteen-inch  lift looking  like  a  canister  was  capable  of hoisting  fifty tons.  It  was  the same technology that had been used to lift salt barges at the Anderton boat lift.

ENGLAND IS SOMETIMES thought of as a land of eccentrics who stubbornly cling to quaint and hopelessly outmoded ways, but it is also the land of entrepreneurs who created the Industrial Age. British industrialists built powerful companies, such as the Salt Union, that were the forerunners of today’s multinational giants. In Cheshire, these two kinds of Englishmen were represented by the Thompsons and the Stubbses.

Both  families  have  long  histories  in  Cheshire  salt.  A 1710 map marks “John Stubbs salt pit,” though today’s Stubbses do not know exactly  who John was.  Some  Stubbses  were  dreamers.  It   was  a Cheshire  Stubbs  who  built  a  plantation  in  the  Turks  and  Caicos Islands. But in the nineteenth century, the Stubbses joined the Industrial Age and sent their sons to school to study engineering.

The Thompsons were cursed with longevity. So while the Stubbses’ family   operations   were   run   by   well-educated   young   engineers schooled  in  new technologies,  the  Thompsons’ family salt business was often run by octogenarian grandfathers and great-grandfathers.

Both families had saltworks near the sinking town of Northwich. Eventually,  various  members  of the  Stubbs  family had salt-works  all over Cheshire. But toward the end of the century, brine works, unable to compete with large companies, were one by one going broke, sinking either financially or literally. In the 1870s, various Stubbs brothers  consolidated  their  operations, and in 1888, they sold  out to the Salt Union.

After selling out and taking a seat on the board of directors, some of the  brothers  opened new saltworks  across  the  county  line.  Then, in 1923, they bought the New Cheshire Salt Works near Northwich.

The Thompsons were  not  that  different.  In  1856, they  started  the Alliance Salt Works by digging a hole behind the Red Lion Hotel. But they too wanted to remain an independent family operation, and after they sold the Alliance Salt Works to the Salt Union in 1888, they dug a new shaft beside the Red Lion Hotel and called it the Lion Salt Works.

New technology had concentrated on finding salt and bringing it to the surface. But once the brine reached the saltworks, little had changed since the time of the Romans. It was still evaporated in lead pans. The pans had gotten larger than the three-by-three-foot Roman ones. The Thompsons had thirty-by-twenty-foot  lead  pans, heated  by coal  that was stoked  from four furnace  doors  in the  huge coal oven under the pan. Into  the  nineteenth  century,  even the  pipes  for  brine  were  still made from hollowed tree trunks. Except for larger pans and coal being burned  instead   of  wood,  most  of  the   process  was  described   in Georgius Agricola’s  1556 work De re metallica, which remained  the standard European text on salt making. The work was first translated into  English  in  1912 by mining  engineer  and future  U.S.  president Herbert Hoover and his wife, Lou Henry Hoover.

Cheshire   salt   makers   had  become   skilled   at   making   different products  for an expanding  and varied  list  of customers.  

Most  of this simply involved adjusting the cooking time. Dairy salt was cooked fast, so  that  the  rapidly  moving  water  would  create  fine  crystals  used  in butter  and cheese.  

The large  grains  of  solar-heated  sea  salt  were replicated  with the  slow heating  of so-called  fourteen-day salt,  which was shipped to Grimsby for salting cod. Salt hardened into blocks and then crushed was locally called “Lagos salt” because  it was shipped to West Africa. Because  the West African market bought salt by volume rather  than  by weight,  all  the  Cheshire  companies  made  a  large, lightweight crystal for that market.

But in 1905, James Stubbs went to Michigan to learn about a new “evaporator.” The fundamental concept of a vacuum evaporator is that lower pressure reduces the boiling point of a liquid. A boiler produces steam,  which  heats  a  chamber,  an evaporator.  The  steam  is  then piped into a second evaporator. The second evaporator cannot heat to as high a temperature, but because  it is in a vacuum, the pressure is lower  and less  heat  is  needed  for  steam.  This  steam  can then  be passed  to a third evaporator. And so an entire series of evaporators can be operated  on the  fuel that was expended to  heat the  first one.

This  solves  one of the  oldest  problems  in salt  brine  production,  the problem the ancient Chinese solved with gas—the cost of fuel.

Liverpool  sugar  refiners  had been using  steam  evaporators  since 1823, when William Furnical had introduced the use of steam heat in sugar  refining. In 1887, the  first vacuum pan salt process  was put in operation   by  Joseph  Duncan  in   Silver   Springs,   New  York.   The evaporator heated brine to steam and forced it into a tank, where salt crystals formed; once the crystals reached a certain size and weight, they dropped  through the  bottom. If they were  too  big, they would  be washed  back up by the  incoming  brine;  if  too  small,  they  would  not drop down. For the first time in the long history of salt, a salt was being made in which every crystal was the same size.

The Stubbses’s first vacuum evaporator. New Cheshire Salt Works, Ltd., Northwich ~

The steam from the first tank was used to heat a second tank and a third tank. Today, up to six or even eight tanks, each evaporating brine, can be fueled by the first evaporating tank.

In the 1930s, the Stubbses finally imported their first salt evaporator to the New Cheshire Salt Works. This magnificent triple-towered machine was art deco in design, with vertical stripes of dark and blond wood  and  polished   brass   fittings   and  gauges.   For   a  while,   the Stubbses still had some open pans for larger crystal salt, but in time, the old pans could no longer compete economically with modern evaporators.  New,  more  efficient  evaporators  were  bought  in  the 1950s and again in the 1990s. The Stubbses, along with the Salt Union, are among only three surviving commercial British salt producers.

Anyone who makes bread in any quantity finds himself getting through a deal of salt. What salt then to use? Since with the exception  of the  famous  Maldon salt  from Essex  on the  east coast—again a luxury—there is now no sea salt extracted from English or Scottish waters, I use Cheshire rock salt sold in 11.2 pound blocks or 2 pound bags or 6 pound clear plastic jars, the latter being the best value and the most convenient. This salt is produced by the old Liverpool firm of Ingram  Thompson (mention of “Liverpool salt” occurs quite often in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century cookery books) whose salt works are at Northwich. This firm’s packaging is minimal and their wholesale prices fair, so if you find you are paying too much for rock salt or “crystal” salt it is probably because  middlemen have bought it in bulk and are charging retailers more than is fair.

—Elizabeth David, English Bread and Yeast Cookery, 1977

WITH BRINE  WORKS closing  or sinking  all around them, the  Thompsons continued  in the  old ways. They sent salt blocks  to  Cheshire  schools for children to make salt carvings. At Christmastime, workers still dipped  branches  into  brine  pans to  grow crystals. In the  1960s, they were still employing hand riveters to mend their lead pans and a steam engine to bring up the brine. Then, in the late 1960s, Nigeria, the Thompsons’ principal remaining market, was destroyed by the Biafran war.

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 operation becomes too unprofitable, it will no longer be able  to  attract the  investment needed to  modernize. This  was the fate of the Thompsons. They hung on for more than a decade  without

making money; finally, in 1986, they gave up.

CHESHIRE IS NOW green English countryside. The pastureland is spotted yellow and purple  with wildflowers and hedges  over which blackberry vines twist. Reedy swan’s paddle grows in the unused canals. It is hard to believe that 100 years ago the sky was black with coal smoke, the horizon filled with a hundred smokestacks, the soil contaminated, arid, barren, and scarred white where the pan scale was dumped.

Local people write to the Thompson works and ask for the old salt, which was packed into  wooden tubs and dried  into  salt blocks. They call it lump  salt and say it is  better for cooking  beans and for curing meat. But there is no more Thompson salt.

The Vale Royal Borough Council bought the site and established a charitable trust, which is trying to make this last of the Northwich brine works a restored museum. It is struggling to get funding because sinkholes surround it. Black-and-white cows lazily nestle into the sinkholes, which are covered with grass and shrubs and delicate white Queen Anne’s lace. But every now and then, a little more subsidence is  seen,  something  else  sinks.  Many believe  that  one  day the  old Thompson brine works will sink too.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Salt and the Great Soul

TWENTIETH-CENTURY INDIA lived under the kind of colonial administration Madison and Jefferson had rejected—the kind that would have made Adams angry. And it did anger a great many Indians. To the British, the Indian economy existed for the enrichment  of Great Britain. Industry was for the  profit of  the  English  Midlands.  Indian salt  was to  be

managed for the benefit of Cheshire.

That  the  British  always  saw India  as a commercial  venture  is demonstrated by the fact that when they first gained a foothold on the Asian subcontinent, they placed it in the  hands of a private trading company, the Honourable East India Company. Founded in 1600 by a royal charter granted by Elizabeth I, the East India company, though a commercial  enterprise,  could  function as a nation,  minting  its  own money, governing its employees as it saw fit, even raising its own army and navy and declaring  war or negotiating  peace at will with other nations, providing they were not Christian. The company bought its first Indian property in 1639, a strip of coastline, and by the end of the century was building the city of Calcutta. A series of eighteenth-century battles between the British and the French eventually secured India for the  British,  who turned  most  of  it  over  to  the  British  East  India

Company.

The company established a sophisticated bureaucracy with a large, well-paid  civil service.  No high-ranking  post  was ever  given to  an Indian. By the nineteenth century, more than half of India was governed by the East India Company and the rest by local princes, who served as puppet rulers for the British. In 1857, Indians openly revolted, and the following year, once the British army had put down the rebellion, the British Crown took over most of the local government from the East India Company.

BEFORE    THE   BRITISH created   artificial  trade   barriers,   India   had affordable, readily available salt. While  it has huge saltless regions, with natural salt fields on both its coasts and huge rock salt deposits and salt lakes in between, India had an ancient tradition of salt making and trading. Although the extensive rock salt deposits in Punjab  are unusually pure, strictly religious Hindus have always had a distrust of rock  salt  and even salt  made from  boiling.  Indians  have always preferred solar-evaporated sea salt not only for religious reasons but because it was more accessible. On the west coast, by what is now the  Pakistani  border,  and on the  east  coast  near  Calcutta,  river estuaries spread out into wetlands and marshes where the sun evaporates seawater, leaving crusts of salt.

On the west coast, in Gujarat, salt has been made for at least 5,000 years in a 9,000-square-mile marshland known as the Rann of Kutch. This marshland is covered by the sea and flooded rivers in the rainy season from August  to  September;  in December,  the  salty water begins to evaporate with help from dry wintry winds from the north.

On the east coast is a salt-producing area known as Orissa, with a perfect natural sea salt zone along a tract that is 320 miles long and ten to sixty miles deep. The salt beds, called khalaris, are flooded in two  spring  tides,  which  saturate  the  soil  with  salt  as  the  water evaporates.  Salt  made from  natural  solar  evaporation  was called kartach. A second salt, panga, was produced by mixing salty soil in seawater and boiling it. The salt was a permanently renewed resource, which rendered this stretch of land not only ideal for salt making but

useless  for anything  else. In Orissa, the poorest of peasants  could make salt on the khalari to use or to sell.

The salt makers would clear the field, the khalari, of all vegetation, grass, and roots to a depth of a few inches and then pile the waste in dikes around the edges.

They built  sluices  to  let  in saltwater  during  high  tide.  Salt  was absorbed  into the earth and then more  saltwater  taken in with the spring tides. The additional seawater combined with the salty soil to produce concentrated brine, which they put in oblong pots, about 200 of which were cemented together by mud in a domeshaped kiln.

The salt makers placed vents at the north and south ends of each kiln so that fire would be fanned by prevailing breezes. As the brine in the pots evaporated, workers called malangis added more brine, one ladle at a time, until each pot was about three-quarters full of salt crystals. The salt, which dried in piles in the open air and which the malangis then covered with reeds, was noted for its whiteness and was considered by many to be the best salt in India, yet it was also inexpensive.

This panga salt had an eager market in the neighboring provinces to the west, shipped on the River Mahanadi and its tributaries. Merchants came to Orissa  to buy salt or barter with products  such as cotton, opium, marijuana, and grains, carried by oxcart from central India.

Even the British in Bengal traded in Orissa salt. They needed large quantities of salt for the manufacture  of munitions for their eighteenth- century wars with the French, and a significant part of the salt for their gunpowder came from Orissa.

Most of India,  since  ancient  times,  had a history of modest  salt taxes. In Orissa, the Maratha, the ruling caste of much of pre-British India,  levied  a  small  tax  on salt  transported  commercially  in the province. The trade was so extensive that they could earn a substantial profit on this moderate tax and avoid a higher one that would damage the competitive price of Orissa salt. In return for this source of revenue, they looked after the promotion and prosperity of the salt trade. The Maratha rulers’ attitude toward Orissa was reminiscent of a Chinese proverb: “Governing a state is like cooking small fish. It has to be done with a very light touch.”

The British practiced this light touch neither in governance nor in cooking. In the late eighteenth century, Cheshire was increasing its salt production and aggressively hunting overseas markets. The empire was expected to provide these markets. Yet Liverpool salt could not compete with the price and quality of Orissa salt. In 1790, when the British  requested  permission  to  buy all  the  salt  made in  Orissa, Raghuji  Bhonsla, the Maratha  governor  of Orissa, turned down the offer, realizing that the British were trying to eliminate  Orissa salt in order to maintain British salt at an artificially high price. But when the British had their  offer  rejected,  they simply banned Orissa  salt  in Bengal.

Since the border that Orissa shared with Bengal was a thick jungle, difficult to patrol, the first effect of the new ban was to create well- organized bands of salt smugglers. Inexpensive contraband salt from Orissa so flooded Bengal that the British salt still could not compete there. In 1803, in the name of fighting contraband, the British army occupied Orissa and annexed it to Bengal.

On November  1,  1804,  by proclamation,  Orissa  salt  became a British monopoly. The private sale of salt was completely prohibited.

Those who had salt in their possession had to sell it to the government immediately at a fixed price. The transport of salt was forbidden. Even provisioning a ship with enough salt for the crew during a voyage had to be done under strict British supervision. Within ten years, it became illegal  for salt to be manufactured by anyone  other than the British government.  A system  of well-paid  informants  was established  to prevent clandestine salt trading.

The earliest  resistance  in Orissa  came from  coastal  chieftains, Zemindars,  whose privilege  and authority were  undermined by the destruction  of the  salt  industry.  Before  the British,  the malangis  in northern Orissa had been under control of the Zemindars, who had earned a good profit selling  the salt made by malangis for meager wages. Workers had paid a high rent to the Zemindars for the use of coastal salt flats and manufactured salt on their own. Part of that rent had been providing  for  all  of  the  salt  needs of  the  Zemindars’

households free of charge.

Still, salt workers had lived considerably better than after the British monopoly in 1804. The British advanced  money to malangis against future salt production, and the malangis got deeper and deeper in debt and eventually were forced to work for the British producing salt to pay off their debt—virtual slaves to the British salt department. Thousands died every year from epidemics, especially cholera.

From the beginning, the Zemindars had obstructed British salt policy and urged the malangis, whom they controlled, to be uncooperative.

The malangis began making their own salt illegally, and hundreds were arrested. In 1817, there was a rebellion in which malangis attacked saltworks and salt offices and chased away agents.

After this uprising failed, the locals gave up on open resistance but engaged  in underground salt manufacture and trade. Some families supported themselves on illegal salt making.

BACK IN ENGLAND, it was well known that the Indians were angry with British salt policy.

It was even mentioned in a cookbook:

One of the  greatest  grievances  of which the  poor man can complain is the want of salt. Many of the insurrections and commotions among the Hindoos, have been occasioned by the cruel and unjust monopolies of certain unworthy servants of the East India Company, who to aggrandize their own fortunes have often times bought up, on speculation, all the salt in the different ports    and   markets.—Mary Eaton, The Cook and Housekeepers Complete and Universal Dictionary, 1822

In the early nineteenth century, to make the salt tax profitable and stop the smuggling, the East India Company established customs checkpoints throughout Bengal. In 1834, a zealous commissioner of customs, G. H. Smith, was appointed, and in his twenty years in office he expanded  the system into a “Customs Line” around Bengal. Salt had to pay a duty to cross this line. He was able to get taxes dropped on a series of lesser items, including tobacco, so that customs officers could concentrate on salt smuggling. Customs officers were given that always disastrous combination of broad powers and low pay. They received bounties for confiscated salt and had unchecked  authority to search, seize, and arrest. Not surprisingly, bribery and other forms of corruption  were  widespread.  In  the  1840s,  in  its  enthusiasm  for enforcing this line, the East India Company  constructed a fourteen-foot-high, twelve-foot-thick thorn hedge on the western side of Bengal to prevent the entry of contraband salt. After the British government took over following the 1857 “mutiny,” as the uprising was labeled, the Customs Line grew until it snaked  arbitrarily 2,500 miles across India from the Himalayas to Orissa. The hedge was expanded  into a spiky gnarl of prickly pear, acacia, and more benign plants such as bamboo.

It was impenetrable  except for periodic gateways guarded by customs agents.  

By 1870,  the  Customs  Line,  largely  dedicated  to  the enforcement of the salt tax, employed 12,000 people.

AT FIRST, HAVING complete control, the British wanted to produce Orissa salt and sell it in Bengal at their prices. They cleared jungle land in the coastal region to extend the salt-producing area. But British salt merchants  became concerned  about  competition  for  sales  in  the Bengal market and lobbied Parliament to repress salt production in Orissa. In 1836, duties on domestic production were made equivalent to duties on imported salt, and from then on the government did not care if salt was local or imported because  it earned the same revenue on both.

The local salt, fighting  its  way through  a cumbersome and complicated bureaucracy, could not compete. It did not sell as fast and had to be stocked in warehouses near Calcutta and therefore risked being  embezzled. The British colonial  administration responded  by limiting  Orissa  production,  even closing  some centers,  saying  that Orissa salt was of inferior quality and had a higher cost of production. In 1845, the colonial government ordered the annual production of salt to be reduced by an amount equal to half the previous  year’s total production.

The commissioner of Orissa, A. J. M. Mills, wrote to the colonial administration warning  that reducing  salt  production  would  turn the peasants of Orissa against the British, for in the salt areas the people knew of no other economic activity.

EVEN IN  THE best of times, the malangis  lived hard lives  in villages adjacent to salt fields. Men, women, and children—families worked the salt fields together. Some men traveled from distant villages, leaving their families  behind, and lived five months of the year in temporary huts near the saltworks.

The British charged malangis for any salt lost during transportation or from inadequate storage, even though transport and storage had nothing to do with salt workers. Salt agents tried to impress on the government the need to raise payments to salt makers, but instead the government, wishing  to discourage  production, periodically lowered the rate.

The British policy was to preserve the jungles near the salt lands as sources of fuel wood. Since these forests had been reduced to clear land for salt production, they had an unusual concentration of tigers, bears, and leopards, and eventually the malangis were so terrified of the jungle that many refused to enter to cut fuel. In the 1846 season alone,  twenty-two  malangis  were  killed  by tigers.  The salt  and the revenue  departments  both  offered  rewards  for  the  heads of  wild animals.  Though the reward was considered  substantial,  it did  not produce enough kills to significantly reduce the wildlife.

In 1863, the British government announced  its intention to stop local salt production and instructed salt agents to end salt manufacture as soon as possible.  The abandonment  of salt  manufacture  led  to  a famine in Orissa in 1866. The greatest loss of life in the famine was among the malangis, because they had no crops of their own to fall back on for food. Government policy also caused a salt shortage in Bengal.

The British responded  to the crisis  by starting their own plant to make kartach salt. The object was to furnish locals with cheap salt while providing them with jobs. It was so successful that Liverpool salt could not compete, and so, in 1893, the government closed down the plant. Outperforming British salt was against the rules.

Once the plant was closed down, the malangis starved, while salt, their traditional cash crop, was lying at their feet in sparkling crusts, waiting to be picked up and sold. But even scraping salt off the surface of the flats was a severely punishable offense. The people of Orissa were forbidden from any activity connected with salt making. They left their starving  wives  and children and went  to  other  parts  of India looking  for  work,  living  in  crowded,  unsanitary  conditions  as they struggled to earn enough from menial labor to send some money to their families.  In time,  the malangis  disappeared  from Orissa,  and anyone there who was poor was now deprived of salt.

THE FIRST PUBLIC meeting in India to protest salt policy took place in Orissa in February 1888, organized by the Utkal Sabha political party in Cuttack, a river port on the River Mahanadi. It was pointed out that impoverished Indians had a tax burden  thirty times greater than did people in England. The tax on salt was termed “an unjust imposition of an imperial character,” because the taxed salt was all imported from abroad. The government was urged to raise the income tax and save money by discontinuing the recruitment of people from abroad to the Indian civil service. These savings, the protesters at the Orissa meeting argued, would compensate the government for the loss of salt tax revenue.

In the  early  twentieth century,  British salt  policy was attacked  in provincial legislatures throughout India. In 1923, to balance the budget, the government proposed doubling the salt tax. The Indian Legislative Assembly refused to support this proposal. But the British approved it anyway by decree from Viceroy Lord Reading. In 1927, the Legislative Assembly voted to halve the salt tax— though many had called for its complete abolition. The British government did not comply.

In the Indian Legislative Assembly of 1929, Pandit Nilakantha Das, a member from Orissa, demanded  the revival of salt making in Orissa and a repeal of the salt tax. The government argued that the salt tax was the only contribution to the state that poor people ever made.

The British government  was not taking the  issue  seriously.  Lord Winterlon, the undersecretary of state  for India, assured  the British government that there was no reason for concern about the salt issue.

Not everyone in England agreed. In British Parliament, Sir Henry Craik argued that the salt tax was causing serious hardship in India and that this hardship  was leading  to civil unrest. Some suggested  that the revenue from the salt tax was not worth the threat that unrest posed  to the British Empire. Labour members warned that the salt tax could be leading them into another Irish situation in India.

In 1930, Orissa seemed near open rebellion.

And so, contrary to  popular  belief  today,  it  was not  an entirely original idea to focus rebellion on salt, when that idea was seized upon by an entirely original man named Mohandas  Karamchand Gandhi.

GANDHI WAS BORN on October  2, 1869, at Porbandar, a small west coast town, capital of a princely state of the same name, on the Gujarat peninsula, not far from the Rann of Kutch. This is one of the reasons that, when he wanted to stage a salt rebellion, he chose this region and not Orissa on the opposite coast. Gandhi said that he felt closest to the salt makers of Gujarat.

When he was growing up in Porbandar, malangis were not a part of his immediate world. He belonged to the Vaisya caste, the number three  caste,  below  the  ruling  classes  but above workers. Gandhi means “grocer,” but Mohandas’s grandfather, father, and uncle had all served as prime minister to the Prince of Porbandar. It was a small state, and its rulers exercised  petty and arbitrary authority over the people while serving British rulers obsequiously. The humble house where Mohandas was born, still standing on the edge of town, testifies to the  lack  of wealth and position of a Porbandar  prime minister. Mohandas’s  marriage,  which was arranged  when he was thirteen, lasted for the next sixty-two years. Despite his enduring reputation for living a life of simplicity and self-denial, he did not come to this easily and struggled in his youth with uncontrolled appetites, both sexual and gastronomic.   In   violation   of   his   family’s   religious   code,  he experimented with meat eating, hoping it would make  him large and strong like the carnivorous English.

Gandhi was a tiny man of peculiar passions and eccentric theories about sexual desire, diet, and bodily functions. Well into old age he conducted “experiments” with young women he asked  to lie naked  with him through the  night to  test  his  resolve  to  abstain  from  sex. He displayed a mischievous sense of humor. It is said that when asked what he thought of Western civilization, he replied, “I think it would be a great idea.”

But Gandhi  did not preach the superiority of Eastern culture. He said, “It would be folly to assume that an Indian Rockefeller would be better than an American Rockefeller.”

He was influenced not only by his Hindu upbringing but by Jainism, which forbids the killing of any creature and whose priests wear masks over their mouths  to ensure  that they do not accidentally inhale an insect and kill it.

He traveled abroad, studying law in London. Visiting Paris, he gave his  impression  of the  new Eiffel  Tower:  “The  Tower  was a good demonstration of the fact that we are all children attracted by trinkets.”

In South Africa he became  the leader of a movement to secure civil rights  for Indians.  Imprisoned  for his  efforts,  he read  Henry David Thoreau’s Civil  Disobedience in the appropriate  setting—a jail cell.

Along  with Buddhist  and Jainist  writings,  Thoreau was to  have an enormous  influence on him.

He 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.”

His adversaries continually underestimated him because  it seemed improbable  that millions  would  follow such an odd man. Gandhi’s approach  to  civil  disobedience  was always  nonviolence,  but  he objected to the phrase “passive resistance.” It was not enough to be nonviolent. The adversary had to be opposed  in such a way that he would not feel humiliated or defeated. He said that the opponent must be “weaned from error.” Seeking a name for his brand of resistance, he took a suggestion from his cousin, Maganlal Gandhi: sadagraha—firmness  in a good cause.

Mohandas changed sada t o satya, which means “truth.” Gandhi would resist with satyagraha—the force of truth, a force that, he said, would  lift both sides.

In all he did, Gandhi displayed an inner confidence. He was certain that his cause was right, and because  it was right it would  prevail. His quiet self-assurance made him a man of constant surprises—making sudden decisions and steering unexpected courses of action. When World  War  I broke  out,  this pacifist  who fought British colonialism announced his support for the British war effort, thereby completely confusing his followers. Just when he appeared to be denouncing the Industrial Revolution and its machinery,  he suddenly confessed  his affection for Singer sewing machines. “It is one of the few useful things ever invented, and there is a romance about the device itself.” Louis Fischer,   his   biographer   who  knew him   personally,   wrote,   “A conversation with him was a voyage of discovery: he dared  to go anywhere without a chart.”

The other  most  famous  Indian of his  day, Nobel  Prize–winning novelist Rabindranath Tagore, a tall and eloquent aristocrat, is credited with giving Gandhi his famous title, mahatma, the great soul, or as he put it, “the great soul in beggar’s garb.”

IN  1885,  THE Indian National  Congress  was founded  in Bombay  by mostly  high-caste  intellectuals,  including  even a  few  Englishmen. Originally,  some were  even in favor  of continuing  British rule.  But gradually they became the leading force  in the  independence movement. It was Gandhi who made the Indian National Congress and the cause of Indian independence  a mass movement.  One of the primary  tools  in  accomplishing  this  metamorphosis  was the salt satyagraha, the salt campaign.

The idea of a salt satyagraha had its beginnings in the 1929 Indian National  Congress  session  in  Lahore.  While  salt  had become a burning issue in a few regions, it was not at the time a national issue, and despite a smoldering rebellion in Orissa and a few other places, most  of Gandhi’s  colleagues  were  barely aware  of it.  Many in the Congress, even those closest to Gandhi, were baffled by his idea of focusing the independence movement on salt. But Gandhi argued that it was an example of British misrule that touched the lives of all castes of Indians. Everyone  ate  salt, he argued. Everyone, in fact, except Gandhi himself, who had renounced the eating of salt and at the time had not touched it in six years.

On March 2, 1930, Gandhi wrote to Lord Irwin, viceroy of India:

If you cannot see your way to deal with these evils and my letter makes no appeal to your heart, then on the twelfth day of this month I shall proceed with such co-workers of the ashram as I can take, to disregard the provisions of the salt laws. I regard this tax to be the most iniquitous of all from the poor man’s standpoint. As the independence movement is essentially for the poorest in the land, the beginning  will be made  with this evil. The wonder is that we have submitted to the cruel monopoly for so long.

The viceroy expressed his regret at Gandhi’s decision to break the law.

The ashram to which Gandhi  referred was in Gujarat, across the Sabarmati River from the city of Ahmadabad. It was an ashram for satyagrahis—people committed to the force of truth—and Gandhi had pointed out to his followers when they settled there that they were conveniently located close to the Ahmadabad  jail, where they would be spending much of their time. The prophecy was accurate.

Jainism was popular in the area, which meant it became a refuge for the pests others exterminated but Jainists would not harm. It was swarming  with snakes. Gandhi lived on the ashram in a small room the size of a prison cell. In fact, prison cells were a small adjustment in Gandhi’s  way of life.  He even commented  that he could get  more reading done in prison.

On March 12, 1930, Gandhi and seventy-eight selected followers left the ashram with the intention of walking 240 miles to the sea at Dandi, where they would defy British law by scraping up salt. A few were not from the ashram, including two Muslims and a Christian and two men from the lowest, untouchable caste. Gandhi intended the group to be a cross section of India, but he refused to allow women marchers out of what he termed “a delicate sense of chivalry.” He explained: “We want to go in for suffering, and there may be torture. If we put the women in front the Government may hesitate to inflict on us all the penalty that they might otherwise inflict.”

They walked slowly along the dusty road, twelve miles a day, with the horizon rippling with heat. Marching in the lead, with a bamboo walking stick, was the bony, sixty-year-old Gandhi, his slow steps full of self- assurance  and determination.  Some grew  too  tired  or  their  feet became too sore, and they retreated to carts. A horse was kept nearby for Gandhi, but he never used it.

The march began each day at 6:30 A.M. By then, Gandhi had been up for hours, spinning cloth, writing articles or speeches. He was seen writing letters by moonlight in the middle of the night. He stopped to speak to the villagers who gathered eagerly to see the mahatma, and he invited them to join him and to break the British salt monopoly. He also preached better sanitation and urged them to abstain from drugs and alcohol,  to  treat  the  untouchables  as  brothers,  and to  wear khaddar,  the homespun  cloth of India,  rather than imported  British textiles. In the 1760s, before the American Revolution, John Adams also  had urged  Americans  to  wear  homespun  instead  of  British imports.

“For me there is no turning back whether  I am alone or joined by thousands,” Gandhi wrote. But he was not alone. Along the way, local officials showed support by resigning  their government  posts.  The Anglo-Indian press ridiculed him; The Statesman of Calcutta said that he could go on boiling seawater indefinitely  till Dominion  status was achieved. But the foreign news media was fascinated by this little man marching against the entire British Empire, and people all over the world cheered his improbable defiance.

The press reported on his power to persuade, his determination. But the viceroy, Lord Irwin, who was being informed by British agents, was convinced  that  Gandhi  would  soon collapse.  He even wrote  the secretary of state for India that Gandhi’s health was poor and that if he continued his daily march, he would die and “it will be a very happy solution.”

On April 5, after twenty-five days of marching, Gandhi reached the sea at Dandi, not with his seventy-eight followers behind him but with thousands. Among them were elite intellectuals and the desperately poor and many women, including affluent women from the cities.

Through the night Gandhi led his followers in prayer by the warm, lapping waves of the Arabian Sea. At first light, he led a few into the water for a ceremony of purification. Then he waded out and felt his way up the beach with his spindly legs to a point where a thick crust of salt, evaporated by the sun, was cracking. He bent down and picked up a chunk of the crust and in so doing broke the British salt law.

“Hail, deliverer!” a pilgrim shouted.

ON THE OTHER side of India, the people of Orissa decided to begin salt making even before  Gandhi  arrived  in Dandi, and they resolved  to continue whether the rest of the country followed Gandhi’s example or not. They opened a camp at Cuttack, to which volunteers from different parts of Orissa came and signed oaths vowing to dedicate themselves to resisting the salt laws. Regular meetings were held to discuss the nature and importance of the salt satyagraha. The British banned such meetings, and people giving public addresses on the subject were arrested and imprisoned.

On April 6,  1930 at 8:30 A.M. Gandhi publicly violated British salt  law by picking up a piece of salt crust in Dandi on the coast of the Gujarat peninsula.

A public salt making was organized in Orissa on April 6 to coincide with Gandhi’s. Locals blew conch shells and tossed flower petals to announce  their day of nonviolent civil disobedience. As they traveled along the coast, their leader, Gopabandhu Choudhury, was arrested, but the group continued. On April 13, at 8:30 A.M., they reached their destination, Inchuri, where thousands turned out to watch them break the law.

They leaned over and scooped  up handfuls of salt. The police tried to forcibly remove the salt from their hands. A crowd of dissidents ran onto the beach, picked up salt, and were taken away by the police. The protests went on for days, with waves  of salt makers followed by waves of police followed by more  salt makers. The police called in reinforcements. Soon the jails were filled, and more and more police and protesters were rushing into Inchuri. The police staged charges, harmless but designed to scare. It didn’t work.

The salt protests spread along the coastline. A large number of the dissidents  were  women. Some of the  salt-making  demonstrations were  even organized  by women. The police  used clubs,  but  the protesters remained nonviolent. After the demonstrations were over, 20,000  people  turned  out to throw flowers  and cheer  the released satyagrahis returning home from prison.

It took  only a week for Gandhi’s ceremonious moment on Dandi beach to  become a  national  movement.  Salt  making,  really  salt gathering, was widespread. In keeping with Gandhi’s other teachings, protesters were picketing liquor stores and burning foreign cloth. Salt was openly sold on the streets, and the police responded with violent roundups. In Karachi, the police shot and killed two young Congress activists. In Bombay, hundreds were tied with rope and dragged off to prison after the police discovered that salt was being made on the roof of the Congress headquarters.

Teachers, students, peasants—it seemed most of India was making salt.  Western  newspapers  covered  the  campaign,  and the  world seemed  to   sympathize,  not   with  the   British   but  with  the   salt campaigners. White “Gandhi  hats” became fashionable in America, while the mahatma remained bareheaded.

But the protest movement had spread to other groups that did not use the force of truth. One such group raided an East Bengal arsenal and  killed   six  guards.   When armored   cars   were   sent against demonstrators in Peshawar, in the northwest, one armored car was attacked and set on fire. A second car opened  fire with machine guns and killed seventy people.

Gandhi sent a letter to Lord Irwin protesting  police violence, which began, as always,  “Dear  Friend.”  He then announced  that he was going  to march to the government-owned  saltworks and take  them over in the name of the people. British troops went to the village near

Dandi, where the leader was sleeping under a tree, and arrested him. The Manchester Guardian warned the British government that the arrest of Gandhi  was a costly misstep  further provoking  India. The Herald, the official organ of the Labour Party, also opposed the arrest of Gandhi.

While India exploded, Gandhi sat in prison spinning cotton. As many as 100,000 protesters, including all of the major leaders and most of the  minor local  ones, were  in prison. Congress  committees  were declared illegal. Still, the salt movement went on. The government tried to negotiate with the jailed leaders. Disapprovingly, Winston Churchill said, “The Government of India had imprisoned Gandhi and they had been sitting outside his cell door, begging him to help them out of their difficulties.”

On March 5, 1931, Lord Irwin signed the Gandhi-Irwin pact, ending the salt campaign. Indians living on the coast were to be permitted to collect salt for their own use only. Political prisoners were released. A round table conference was scheduled in London  to discuss British administration in India. And all civil disobedience was to be stopped. It was considered a compromise. To some, the British had won on most points, but Gandhi was pleased because he thought that for the first time England  and India were  talking as equal partners  rather than master and subject.

Irwin suggested they drink a tea to seal the pact, and Gandhi said his tea would be water, lemon, and a pinch of salt.

Gandhi had emerged as the leading voice of Indian aspirations, and the Indian National Congress had become  the primary organization of the independence movement. In 1947, India became independent, and five months  later Gandhi  was assassinated  by a fellow Hindu who mistakenly interpreted his efforts to make peace with Muslims as part of a plan to favor them. Jawaharlal Nehru, the son of a patrician lawyer who helped  found  the  Indian  National  Congress,  became prime minister. Nehru was once asked how he remembered Gandhi, and he said he always thought of him as the figure with a walking stick leading the crowd onto the beach at Dandi.

IN  300 B.C., long before  the British arrived, a book titled Arthasastra recorded that under India’s first great empire, founded by Chandragupta  Maurya, salt manufacture was supervised  by a state official called a lavanadhyaksa under a system of licenses granted for fixed fees. More than a half century after the British left, salt production was still supervised by the government.

After  1947,  independent  India  was committed  to  making  salt available at an affordable price. Salt production in independent Indiawas organized  into  small  cooperatives,  most  of  which  failed.  The industry  is  now controlled  by a  few  powerful  salt  traders.  The government is supposed  to look after the interests of the salt workers through the  Salt  Commissionerate. Across  the  river from Gandhi’s ashram,  in  Ahmadabad, Gujarat’s  Salt  Commissionerate  stands accused  by many workers of looking after the traders rather than the workers.

The rock salt of Punjab is now in Pakistan. The west coast, Gujarat and the  Rann of  Kutch,  has become India’s  major  salt  producer, whereas Orissa, with only six saltworks  surviving into contemporary times, is no longer an important salt-producing  region. Almost three- quarters of India’s salt is now produced in Gujarat. Gujaratis, with their coastal economy, are not among India’s poorest population. But the wages in the saltworks are so low that most salt workers come from more impoverished regions. Every year, in September, thousands of migrant workers arrive in Gujarat to work seven-day  weeks until the salt season  ends in the spring. They often earn little more than a dollar a day. Hundreds of workers are undeclared so that the salt traders can avoid paying them social benefits and circumvent laws forbidding child labor.  Many  of  the  workers  are  from  the  lowest  caste  and are hopelessly in debt to the salt producers. The glare of the salt in the dry- season sunlight renders many of the salt workers permanently color- blind. And they complain that when they die, their bodies cannot be properly cremated because  they are impregnated with salt.

A storm that hit Gujarat in June 1998 decimated this cheap labor force, killing between 1,000 and 14,000 people, depending on whose count is believed. The price of Indian salt soared. But by the end of the year, the workforce had been replaced and the price had dropped back. Once again, salt could be purchased at a low, affordable price— which every Indian citizen has a right to expect.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Not Looking Back

SOME 3,000 YEARS ago, wanting a capital in the commanding heights of the  Judean hills,  David  conquered  the  fortress  of  Zion  and built Jerusalem. Those heights have at times been a fortified high ground and at  other  times  a peaceful  gardened  promenade.  They offer, depending  on the times, either a scenic  or a strategic  view of the region. Not only can a great deal of Israel be seen from here, but, on a clear day, the Moab  mountains  of Jordan are  in view as a distant pinkish cloud. But what cannot be seen, because it is lower than the horizon—in fact, it is the lowest point on earth, 1,200 feet below sea level—is  a vanishing  natural wonder: the Dead Sea. The Hebrews called the sea Yam HaMelah, the Salt Sea.

About forty-five miles long and eleven miles at its widest, the Dead Sea, with the Israeli-Jordanian border running through the center of it, seems a  peaceful  place,  of  a  stark  and barren  beauty.  A first impression might be that the area is uninhabitable, and yet, like many of the world’s  uninhabitable  corners, it  has been converted, with a great deal of water and electricity, into a fast-growing and profitable resort.

The minerals in the Dead Sea give a strange buoyancy that entices tourists for brief dips. The sea is oily on the skin and doesn’t feel like water. This is brine that will float more than an egg. After wading in a few feet, a human body pops to the surface, almost above the water, as though lying on an air-filled float. It is a most comfortable mattress, perfectly conforming to every part of the back—what a waterbed was supposed  to be. The water, if it is water, is clear, but every swirl is visible in its syrupy density. The minerals can be felt working into the

skin, and it feels as though some metamorphosis is taking place. The bather is marinating.

The Dead Sea from Picturesque Palestine,  Sinai  and Egypt (Volume 2) edited by Charles Wilson, 1881.

Pliny wrote: “The bodies of animals do not sink in it—even bulls and camels  float;  and from  this  arises  the  report  that  nothing  sinks.” Edward Robinson, an American professor of biblical  literature, reported after his 1838 trip, with no more hyperbole than Pliny, that he could “sit, stand, lie or swim in the water without difficulty.”

JERICHO, AN OASIS a few miles north of the Dead Sea near the Jordan River, which flows to the Dead Sea, is thought to be the oldest town in the world. Almost 10,000 years ago, Jericho was a center for the salt trade. In 1884, in the nearby Moab Mountains of Jordan, the Greek Orthodox Church decided to build a church at the site of a Byzantine ruin in the town of Madaba. Workers uncovered a sixth-century mosaic floor map, still on display on the floor of the church of St. George, showing the Dead Sea with two ships carrying salt, heading toward Jericho.

But  the  sea  may have been better  for  transporting   salt  than producing it. The oily water of the Dead  Sea is bitter, as though it were cursed. The area is famous for curses, the most well known being the one that destroyed  Sodom and Gomorrah.  The exact  locations  of Sodom and Gomorrah are unknown, but its residents are thought to have been salt  workers and the towns are  believed  to have been located in the southern Dead Sea region. Since Genesis states that God annihilated  all vegetation at  the  once-fertile  spot,  this  barren,

rocky area fits the description. But this area also has a mountain— more like a long jagged ridge—called Mount Sodom, of almost pure salt carved by the elements into gothic pinnacles.

According to the Book of Genesis, Abraham’s nephew, Lot, lived in Sodom and was spared when God destroyed the town, but Lot’s wife, who looked back at the destruction, was turned into salt. As columns break away from Mount Sodom, they are identified for tourists as Lot’s wife. Unfortunately, they are unstable formations. The last Lot’s wife collapsed  several  years  ago,  and the  current  one, featured  in postcards  and on guided  tours,  will  go very  soon, according  to geologists.

In biblical times, Mount Sodom was the most valuable Dead Sea property. It was long controlled by the king of Arad, who had refused entry to Moses  and his wandering Hebrews from Egypt. One of the most important trade routes in the area was from Mount Sodom to the Mediterranean—a salt route. Not far from Mount Sodom, in the motley shade of  a scraggly  acacia  tree,  are  a few  stone  walls  and the remnants of a doorway. They are the remains of a Roman fort guarding the salt route. A little two-foot-high stone dam across the wadi, the dry riverbed, after flash floods still holds water to be stored in the nearby Roman cistern.

The other source of wealth in the area besides Mount Sodom, which was mined for salt until the 1990s, is the Dead Sea. A body of water appears so unlikely in this arid wasteland cursed by God that in the afternoon, when the briny sea is a cloudy turquoise  mirror reflecting pink from the Jordanian mountains, the water could easily be mistaken for a mirage.

Pliny wrote that “the Dead Sea produces only bitumen.” This natural asphalt was valued for caulking ships and led the Romans to name the sea Asphaltites Lacus, Asphalt Lake. Its water is 26 percent dissolved minerals, 99 percent of which are salts. This concentration is striking when compared to the ocean’s typical mineral concentration of about 3 percent.

The Judean desert, the below-sea-level continuation of the Judean hills,  is  a bone-white  world of turrets and high walls,  rising  above narrow,  deep canyons so  pale  they  glow  sapphire  blue in  the moonlight. The millions of small marine fossils embedded  in the rock prove that this desert was once a sea bed, whose waters dried up in the heat that is sometimes more than 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

The seemingly barren desert hides life. There are said to be 200 varieties of flowers in the Judean  desert, but they bloom only briefly and only by chance does a lucky wanderer ever see one. Graceful long-horned  ibex,  desert  mountain goats,  leap  over  rocks. Acacia trees, which grow in the wadis, have roots that grow as deep as 200 feet  and contain  salt  to  help  them  draw  up the  water  hidden underground. A shrub known as a salt bush absorbs  salt from the ground into its leaves so the leaves can soak up any moisture from the

air.

The dry earth is actually laced with underground  springs, some fresh, some brackish, which are easy to find because they are marked by small areas of vegetation. Each of these springs, ein in Hebrew and Arab, has its own history. 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 pioneers, the dreamers, the fanatics, and the zealots. Many biblical references to going off “into the wilderness” allude to this area.

Across the Dead Sea, the barren, rocky, Jordanian desert is browner. The eight-mile-wide  fertile strip of the Jordan Valley’s east bank feeds the nation. Israel, across the river, is the land of cell phones and four-wheel-drives. Here, farmers ride on donkeys, Bedouin ride on camels, some still living in their dark wool tents, their long dark gowns elegantly furling in the desert wind.

Jordanians sometimes call the Dead Sea “Lot’s Lake.” Mohammed Noufal, a pleasant, graying government employee, explained that, according  to the  Koran,  it  was made the lowest point on earth to punish Lot’s tribe for being homosexuals.

But if they were all homosexuals, how can they have descendants to punish?

Well, many were homosexuals.

THE CAUSE OF the Dead Sea’s tremendous salinity has been the object of curiosity for centuries. In December 1100, after the knights of the first crusade made him ruler of what they termed the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, Baldwin I toured what is now the Israeli side of the Dead Sea. Fulcher of Chartres, who accompanied him, observed that the sea had no outlet and hypothesized that the source  of its salt was minerals washing off of “a great and high salt mountain” where the Dead Sea ended to the south—Mount Sodom.

Several times in the eighteenth century, Dead Sea water samples were sent back to Europe for analysis. One such study was published by Antoine-Laurent  Lavoisier,  the  celebrated  French  chemist.  A number  of  nineteenth-century  American  Protestant  fundamentalists tried to study the Dead Sea, some through exploration and others by way of samples. Edward Hitchcock, who taught at Amherst, concluded through samples and biblical studies that the source of the sea’s salt was sulphurous springs  some 125 miles  away. Had he visited, he would have found brackish springs much closer.

In 1848, an American navy lieutenant, W. F. Lynch, reasoning that since the Mexican-American War was over, “there was nothing left for the Navy to  perform,”  persuaded  his  superiors  to  finance  his  own expedition to the Dead Sea. Two boats with hulls of corrosion-resistant metals, in itself a considerable technical advance at that time, were specially designed and carried overland from the port of Haifa to the Jordan River. Lynch and his team sailed down the Jordan River to the Dead Sea,  which  he found  to  be “a  nauseous compound.”  They continued sailing south for eight days and landed at the southern end of the sea. Lynch thought Mount Sodom to be not much of a mountain, which is true, and thought its composition to have a low percentage of salt, which is less true. Finding a broken-away column, he had a not particularly original thought: that it resembled Lot’s wife. When he analyzed  a sample, he discovered  that  it was almost pure sodium chloride,  which  either  proved  the  salt  content  of  the  mountain  or confirmed the identity of the salt pillar.

Contemporary geologists still argue conflicting theories of why the Dead Sea is so salty. According to the most widely accepted of them, 5   million   years   ago  the   Dead  Sea   was  connected   to   the Mediterranean near the current port of Haifa. A geologic shift caused the Galilee Heights to push up, and these newly formed mountains cut off the Mediterranean  from the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea no longer received enough water to keep up with the rate of solar evaporation, and it began to get saltier.

This   theory  would   explain  why the   sea  is   becoming   more concentrated, slowly evaporating like a huge salt pond. It is already at the density at which sodium chloride precipitates, and salt has started crystallizing out on the bottom and the edges. Bathers gingerly step over sheets of icelike salt as they enter for a Dead Sea swim.

IN THE EARLY twentieth century, Theodor Herzl, an Austrian visionary, began writing of the return of Jews to their homeland. In contemplating the viability of a Jewish state, he hypothesized that one of its valuable resources would be the Dead Sea, from which the new state could extract mineral wealth,  including bromine and potash. In the  1920s, Moishe Novamentsky, a Jewish engineer from Siberia, established the Palestine Potash Company along the northern coast of the Dead Sea, in British-ruled Palestine.

In 1948, when the Arab League attacked the newly formed state of Israel, the Jordanian army crossed the Jordan River and seized most of the Dead Sea area, including the Palestine Potash Company, much of the Judean desert, and the eastern side of Jerusalem. For the next nineteen years, gun- and rocket fire crossed the border. The Potash Company was moved  to Israeli-held land in the southern Dead Sea area and renamed the Dead Sea Works. The workers of the Dead Sea Works became the first Israeli pioneers in this frontier wilderness, living  in rough  huts  with little  electricity,  limited  water,  and no air- conditioning. There too they were regularly shelled by Palestinians on the Jordanian side. Cut off from Jerusalem and much of Israel by the Jordanians, the Dead Sea Works found its own water wells. Today the saltworks  have relocated  along  extensive  artificial  ponds, and the original camp—the small houses and dining hall abandoned on a dusty plateau—is   being   restored   as  a  monument   to  the   resourceful adventurers who built Israel.

In 1956, some Israeli soldiers, having finished a tour of duty at the Dead Sea, decided to stay, drawn to a freshwater spring called Ein Gedi  where  a green  wadi  leads  to  a tall,  thin cascade magically tumbling water out of the desert, one of only two waterfalls in Israel that flow all year. Pliny had mentioned the spot for its remarkable fertility, though,  he said,  it  had been destroyed  in war  with the  Romans. Possessed by Herzl’s Zionist dream of making the desert bloom, the Israeli soldiers founded a collective settlement in Ein Gedi, a kibbutz, where everyone worked for the profit of the community, children were raised  collectively  in separate  dormitories,  and a paradise  was to bloom on the Judean frontier. Plants were brought into a garden with lawns and tropical trees from Asia and Africa—lichees, brilliant red flamboyants, thick, climbing, green broad-leafed vines. Birds, spotting the rich green garden from the air, have made it a principal stop on their Europe-Africa migration.

It had all been predicted  in Herzl’s 1902 novel, Old New Land, in which he imagines visiting the new Jewish state in 1923 and finding the Jews not only exploiting the Dead Sea’s mineral wealth but making the desert green through irrigation and living in farm collectives that exported produce to Europe. However, he also predicted  that Israel would be a German-speaking  nation and that Arabs  would eagerly welcome Jews for the economic development they would bring to the region.

The kibbutz grew, building a health spa on the shore of the Dead Sea that offered Dead Sea mud and Dead Sea water, both of which had long  been supposed to  have healing  properties.  By the  late 1960s, the kibbutz had built a hotel that today is one of Israel’s leading tourist attractions.

In 1960, the Israelis built a hotel along another spring to the south, Ein Bokek. Since the Jordanians were to the north of Ein Gedi, the south was the only place for Israelis to develop. The Dead Sea Works had brought in water  and electricity,  and now the  visitor could  be offered the miracle that makes deserts livable: air-conditioning. But the Ein Bokek development was not really on the Dead Sea. Just south of the sea, the salt company had pumped Dead Sea water into a flooded area divided by dikes. There, the brine was moved from pond to pond, ever more concentrated until finally the precious salt minerals fell out of the solution in the form of a white slush that was scooped up. Still, these artificial salt ponds, concentrated to a brilliant turquoise, made a stunning sea, and sand was brought in for small beaches.

By 2000, Ein Bokek had 4,000 rooms in fourteen hotels, all with Dead Sea health spas offering a variety of treatments—an improbable oasis of white and pastel high-rises on the shores of a saltworks. The Israelis keep building ever taller hotels, and the discreet screens used by religious people to separate women’s and men’s nude sunbathing on the roofs of older hotels are of little help when hundreds of guests can look down from newer hotels ten stories above.

The Israeli Defense Ministry pays for every wounded Israeli veteran, and there are many, to visit a Dead Sea spa hotel two times a year.

Both Danish and German government health insurance will pay for a stay in an Ein Bokek spa hotel. The Israeli tourism business has in recent years begun rethinking its markets. It has not attracted Jews in the  numbers  hoped for.  Herzl had said  that attracting  the  Jewish diaspora would be a slow process, but after a half century as a nation, according  to  the  Israeli  Ministry of  Tourism,  only  17  percent  of American Jews have ever visited Israel. Christian American tourism does better, and Germans, either seeking sunshine or health spas, are the new booming trade, Israelis report without the least note of irony.

Germans  are  the  largest  national group,  after Israelis,  to  visit Ein Bokek. They also comprise one third of the visitors to Ein Gedi.

BUT THERE IS a problem.

In 1985, the Ein Gedi kibbutz built a new spa on the edge of the Dead Sea.  It  has the  atmosphere  of  a public  beach, packed on Saturdays  with  Israelis  lined  up like  crudely formed  clay  statues, bizarrely coated in thick black mud, baking to a gray crust in the sun.

But though the spa was originally built on the water’s edge, today a trolley carries  bathers  to  the  water  almost  a mile  away. The sea recedes from Ein Gedi about fifty yards a year.

In the first century A.D., Pliny described the now 45-by-11 mile body as being 100 miles by 75 miles. A two-lane road that used to run along the sea is now several miles inland. A flat, rocky plain that was once the sea’s floor leads to the water’s edge. Mountains rise up against the other side  of the road, and on one rock about ten feet above the pavement  the  initials PEF are written. This is where the Palestinian Exploration  Fund, a  British  geographic  organization,  marked  the surface of the Dead Sea in 1917.

The greatest problem of the Dead Sea is that since the Israelis built the National Water Canal from the Sea of Galilee, the Galilee  has served as Israel’s primary source of freshwater, greatly reducing the flow to the Jordan River, which in turn is siphoned off by Jordanian farmers in the valley, who provide 90 percent of Jordan’s produce. Not much water is left for the dying ancient sea.

Pliny called the Jordan “a pleasant stream” and said, “It progresses, seemingly with reluctance, toward the gloomy Dead Sea by which it is finally swallowed.” But today the stream that approaches  the Dead Sea is a little rush of silted water in a reedy gully a few feet wide.

Lieutenant  Lynch’s  specially  designed  boats  or  even a  one-man rowboat could not navigate this river to the Dead  Sea.

Is the Dead Sea becoming  a Saharan-like  sebkha, a dried bed ready for scraping? Currently, the sea loses about three feet in depth every year. Since the northern end is in places 1,200 feet deep, it is thought that the sea has several centuries left. Another theory is that it will shrink but reach a level of such concentration  that it will no longer evaporate, which seems optimistic considering the ubiquitous dry salt beds in all of the world’s major deserts.

A few years ago, “Dead-Med” became a popular phrase in Israel.

The plan was to dig a waterway reconnecting the Dead Sea with the Mediterranean.  This  idea  currently appears  deader  than the Dead Sea.  The  introduction  of  Mediterranean   water   would   alter   the composition of the Dead Sea, and mineral extraction would no longer be  practical,  thereby  destroying  one of  Israel’s  most  profitable industries.

The Dead Sea has its health spas and tourism, but the biggest business in the area, as Herzl had predicted, is the Dead Sea Works, which has even become an international  company,  investing  in a potash mine in Spanish Catalonia, near Cardona.

The Jordanians,  apparently  having  read  their  Herzl,  are  also counting on their Dead Sea works. The Arab Potash Company is a mirror  image  directly across  from the  Israeli  company.  This  is the Arab-Israeli border: two sets of earthen dikes less than three feet high with a cloudy turquoise Israeli evaporation pond on one side and a cloudy turquoise Jordanian pond on the other, and in between about 100 yards of white and rust and amber soil where minerals from the two ponds leach through the earthworks.

Until a peace treaty was signed with Israel in 1996, the Jordanian Dead Sea region was a military zone, off limits to civilians. Now, at peace, Jordan has few resources  but is  full of  plans.  Mohammed Noufal observed  with a smile,  “All  we need is  Israel’s  technology, Egypt’s workers, Turkey’s water, and Saudi Arabia’s oil, and I am sure we can build a paradise here.”

The Jordanians too are building health spas and attracting German tourists  of their own. But for them  also, salt will remain  the leading economic  activity. There  are  four Israeli pumps  and two Jordanian pumps moving Dead Sea water into evaporation ponds.

Sodium chloride, the salt of the past, is the first to precipitate out of concentrated brine. But hauling in bulk out of the Judean desert is too costly because  of the lack of a waterway connection. The climb through the mountains is too steep for a railroad. The salt had to be hauled by truck until the Israelis built an eleven-mile-long conveyer belt. It carries 600 to 800 tons of salt in seventy minutes to the town of Tzefa, where the land is then level enough for a railroad to the Mediterranean.

This  system  is  still  too  expensive  for  sodium  chloride  to  be profitable. But the Israeli company sells 10 percent of the potassium chloride—potash—in   the  world,  a  product  much in  demand for fertilizers. It also produces liquid chloride and bromide for textiles and pharmaceuticals  and methyl bromide,  a pesticide.  Under  pressure because of  damage to  the  ozone layer,  it  is  phasing  out  methyl bromide production. The Jordanians say they are thinking of starting it up.

The  Dead  Sea  Works  believes  its  future  is  in  magnesium.

Magnesium chloride, what Lieutenant W. F. Lynch called “a nauseous compound,” is the salt that gives the sea its bitter unpleasant taste. It is a slightly more  expensive  but less  corrosive  alternative  to  sodium chloride for deicing roads. From magnesium chloride, the Dead Sea Works also produces magnesium, a metal that is seven times stronger than steel and lighter than aluminum. The company has invested in a joint venture with Volkswagen to make car parts. Will one more Herzl prediction come true and Israel become German-speaking after all?

Once the sodium chloride precipitates out, falling to the bottom of the pond, the principal target mineral is 6H2O MgCl2 KCl. This grayish crystal  sludge,  called  carnolite,  fuses  potassium  chloride,  sodium chloride, and magnesium chloride into a single crystal.

The sodium chloride that precipitates out before carnolite is allowed to fall to the bottom of the pond, constantly raising the height of the pond bottoms. The company keeps building the dikes higher, but the raised  ponds have been flooding  hotel  basements,  to  the  great irritation of the tourism industry. The Dead Sea Works counters that its workers were the pioneers who dug the wells and provided the water and electricity that made  the area  usable  in the first place.  Tensions persist.   This  is,  after  all,  the  Middle   East.  The  Dead  Sea   Works, recognizing the problem, has  started  a flood  prevention  program to help hotels.

Common salt has become a nuisance.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Last Salt Days of Zigong

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 pharoah abdicating in 1912. For China, the following century has been a period of transition—dramatic change and perpetual reevaluation.

After  1912, the  new Chinese  republic  struggled  economically at  a time  when World  War  I  was  consuming  the  treasuries  of  Europe, blocking  loans  that might otherwise  have been available  for a young and   embattled    government.   With   Western   encouragement,   the Chinese went back to one of the old ideas of the emperors. Salt could fill their treasury.

In April 1913, the new Chinese government obtained a Western loan from the Quintuple Group of Bankers of £25 million. The entire revenue of the salt administration was put up as security to repay the loan. The salt administration that the  republic  inherited  from the  emperors  was elaborate but extremely corrupt. In order for it to regain credibility in the eyes  of  Western  bankers,  the  Chinese  had to  place  a  foreigner  in charge  of purging  the  system. An Irishman named Sir Richard  Henry Dane  was   hired   to   be   chief   foreign   inspector   to   the   Chinese government.  Amusingly,   in  the   hindsight   of  history,   Dane’s  great qualification for this post was that he had been inspector general of the Salt   Excise   in  India   at   a  time   when  Indian  salt   policy  was  still considered an enormous success. Dane himself freely admitted that in India  local salt had not been able  to  compete  with Liverpool salt, but what was viewed  as  the  important accomplishment in India  was that the administration had derived enormous revenue from salt.

Nicknamed  “the  salt  king,”  Dane  seems  to  have  been  a  British colonial  cliché,  complete  with  bushy mustache,  walking  stick,  and a reputation  for  big-game  hunting. According  to  a  1917 issue  of  the American magazine Asia, when the Chinese offered him the position, he had been about to embark on a two-year “hunting trip in the wilds of

Africa.”

Interviewing   the   new  republic’s   new  salt   king, A s i a magazine described Dane as “shaggy and blustering.”

“I suppose you Americans know nothing about Chinese salt or its administration,” he began a bit testily, as he finished a scone and set  down a  cup  of  tea  in  his  comfortable  apartment  in Peking.

In  the   old  administration,   salt   was  taxed   along   the   road   from producer to consumer. To cross Hubei Province, one had to pay forty- two different taxes. In theory, salt production was a government monopoly, but in practice  China  was too  large  for the  government to control all salt production, trade, and transport. Instead, it merely tried to control commerce, by authorizing an elite group of merchants to transport the salt from place of production and then taxing the transportation. These elite  firms, known as Yuen Shang, were  usually family owned and either rented out these rights or maintained them as a family monopoly from generation to generation. In Chinese folk literature,  the  salt  smuggler  is  always  a  hero  fighting  the  evil  and corrupt salt administration. The villain of the story is often not the government but the Yuen Shang.

Salt merchants  amassed  great wealth and liked  to  display it. Both Shaanxi Province, north of Sichuan, and Shanxi Province, north of that and near Beijing, are famous for  elegant mansions built by seventeenth-century salt merchants. In Suzhou, a city of canals  some fifty  miles  west  of  Shanghai,  best  known for  its  silk  merchants,  the gardens  that have become one of China’s  leading  tourist attractions were built by salt merchants.

Smuggling was widespread. Dane was informed that half the salt consumed in China at the time was smuggled. The Yuen Shang took advantage of the lack of a standard unit of measure to carry more salt than they reported and sell the surplus on the black market. Boatmen and cart drivers were able to bribe inspectors and make profits from smuggling. Dane estimated that 40,000 people were engaged  in mostly  illegal  salt  traffic  on the  Yangtze  River  alone,  involving  many thousands of  square-sailed salt junks.  He organized the Salt Preventive Service with salt police stations at strategic points, but this failed to stop the smuggling.

In Strange   Tales   from   a  Chinese   Studio, Herbert   A.  Giles described the smuggling he observed on a trip from Swatow to Canton in 1877:

A propos  of salt,  we came  across  a  good sized  bunker  of it when stowing away our things in the space below the deck. The boatman could not resist the temptation of doing a little smuggling  on the  way up. At  a  secluded  point  in  a  bamboo shaded bend of the river, they ran the boat alongside the bank, and were instantly met by a number  of suspicious-looking gentlemen with baskets, who soon relieved them of the smuggled salt and separated in different directions.

DANE ASSERTED THAT “it is the salt revenue that has been safeguarding the credit of China. . . . Salt has always formed one of the principal sources of government revenue but since June 1913, when the reform administration  was  inaugurated,  it  has  leaped  into  first  place.”  Until

1915, maritime  custom was the  leading  government revenue  source. But Dane claimed that once he had reestablished a centralized salt administration in 1915, salt revenue increased over the previous year by 100 percent.

Dane found the Chinese to be heavy salt consumers, notably higher than in India. He asserted that the Japanese were the heaviest salt consumers in the  world and that the  Chinese  consumed at about the same rate, which he estimated to be about twenty pounds per capita.

It is probable that neither Chinese nor Japanese  consumption was as high as American, but the fact that Japan would even have such a reputation was remarkable considering its unsuitability for salt production.  Japan has  a  long  and meandering  coastline  that  would otherwise provide ideal tidal ponds and inlets for sea  salt production, but its humid climate with regular storms and periodic flooding renders it a salt region of high cost and low production.

Historically, the Japanese depended on imported salt, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a modernization plan under Emperor  Meiji  built a strong  centralized economy and a modernized military. Newly empowered Japan thought it  was unwise to be dependent  on foreign  salt.  In January  1905, the  Salt  Monopoly Law came into force, establishing twenty-two salt offices around the country to  regulate  production,  which became  a state  monopoly.  The Japan Monopoly Office set prices and ended imports.

Salt  production  was  concentrated  on the  Seto  Inland  Sea,  which, though far from ideal, was deemed the best sea salt climate in Japan because  it is sheltered between two islands in a relatively southern climate. The main area, from Osaka to Hiroshima, was devastated in World War II, but the  beds were  restored  in the  1950s. Industrialized Japan has remained self-sufficient in edible salt for products including pickles, salted fish, soy sauce, and miso. Miso is a Japanese offshoot of the Chinese import soy sauce,  and like soy sauce,  it is made from salt-fermented beans.

Traditionally, though less so today, a Japanese meal ended with pickles, and in the north pickles are served with afternoon tea. Japanese homes almost always had a smell of pickling, which is one reason most  Japanese  now prefer  to  buy their  pickles. Among their favorite  pickles  are  eggplant,  Chinese  cabbage,  radish greens,  and mustard greens, which are added to rice. Daikon, a root that is curiously known as either a Japanese radish or a Chinese turnip, is a staple of Buddhist monastaries, pickled in alternate layers of salt and rice bran.

Dane  found  that  the  Chinese  also  “use  a  great  deal  of  salt  for soaking  and preserving  vegetables,  salting  fish,  pickling  and preserving  meat.”  This  was  why the  Chinese  and  Japanese  were heavy consumers of salt.

AT THE TIME Dane went to China, as throughout history, most Chinese salt was sea  salt, pumped into evaporation ponds by windmills. However, Dane said, “The best salt in China is that produced from the salt  wells  of  Sichuan.”  Sichuan  produced  about  one-fifth  of  China’s salt.

Dane had arrived  at the  end of a golden age  of Sichuan salt, that had begun in the eighteenth century. The salt wells were mostly located around  what  became  the  city  of  Zigong. Between  1850 and 1877, there were 1,700 salt merchants in Zigong, and 20 percent of salt production was held by four families that had accumulated fabled wealth.

Zigong  grew  along  a curve  of the  Fuxi  River,  a gracefully winding tributary of the Yangtze, clogged with shallow, flat-bottomed, oar- powered boats that carried salt to much of central China.

The Yangtze, the 3,700-mile waterway from the Tibetan mountains to the port of Shanghai, the third-longest river in the world, divides China into  its  north  and south,  and yet,  until the  1949 Communist  victory, China had so little transportation infrastructure that there was not a single bridge crossing it. The Yangtze was the key transportation artery through China and its  tributaries,  the  only connection  between  north and south China.

By the  seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,  salt  merchants  were traveling regularly to the little provincial town of Zigong. In 1736, merchants from Shaanxi Province began construction of a guild hall in Zigong   for   out-of-province   salt   traders.   It    took   sixteen   years   to complete this palace with roofs fanning out like wings in all directions, nimble stone  dragons  leaping  from the  edges.  The courtyards  were lined  with  red  pillars,  not  the  usual  wooden pillars,  but  stone  ones painted red.

Long before the red star and red flag of Communism found their chromatically perfect home in China, red  was the  Chinese color. The symbol of happiness, it was the color worn by a bride at her wedding. And so the salt merchants built a red palace with gilded carvings depicting Daoist legends. The guild hall, like many Chinese houses of the period, used no nails but was held together by fitted joints. It combined the four-sided courtyard of northern architecture with the upward  curved  roof  tips  of  the  south.  As  local  Chinese  opera  was performed on a stage on the balcony, a distinguished audience watched from the courtyard that was gardened with tall trees and elegant dwarf bonsais.

Jealous of the out-of-town merchants’ showy guild hall, the local salt merchants in Zigong built their own red-pillared, wing-roofed mansion, a temple with a commanding view of commerce on a high bank over the  curving  Fuxi, from where  they could  view the  congested  traffic  of flat-bedded boats rowing cargoes of salt to the Yangtze.

The well technology that had been ahead of the world  in the Middle Ages  continued  to  improve.  One advance  was  the  addition  of  four oxen driven in a circle, attached to a pole, which wound and released tough rope braided from bamboo leaves. The rope system was counterweighted  with huge rock slabs  and ran to  a large  wheel  that served as a pulley and then to the top of the derrick to control the bamboo tube  that was dropped  down for brine. The longer the  tube, the higher the wooden derrick that raised and lowered it.

The brine was piped to gas-heated pans in the boiling house. Then a ladle of ground  yellow bean, soya, and water would be added. After about  ten minutes  a yellow  scum would form on the  surface  and be skimmed off, ridding the salt of impurities with a simpler formula than Europeans ever found. After the brine had been boiled five or six hours to pure crystal, the salt was shoveled into a barrel and hardened.

In 1835, a  new well,  the  Shen Hai  well,  was  drilled  in Zigong. At 2,700 feet, it struck natural gas. At 2,970 feet, the well reached natural brine,  but  the  drilling continued  down to 3,300 feet,  making  it  at  the time  the  deepest drilled well in the  world. Twenty-four years  later, an American would be cheered for the achievement of having drilled 69.5 feet in Titusville, Pennsylvania.

The Chinese  used  oxen until  1902, shortly  before  Dane’s  arrival, when coal-fired  steam  engines  were  introduced.  In  the  nineteenth century, the Zigong ox herd was usually about 100,000 head. Because of the  oxen, in Zigong,  unlike  most  of China,  beef,  albeit  very tough beef, was part of the working-class diet. At the rig where they labored, salt workers would boil the tough old ox meat until  it was tender, and then they would add the most common Sichuan seasoning, ma-la. 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 perfumey 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.

Another specialty of Zigong salt workers was huobianzi. The tough thigh of an old salt well ox was cut by hand in a continuous paper-thin slice by slowly turning the leg. Some pieces could be two yards long.

Zhang Jianxin,  managing  director  of  Sichuan  Zigong  Tongxin  Food Corporation   in    Zigong,    where    huobianzi    is    still    made   today, complained that it is difficult to get a leg as tough as the legs from the old  working   oxen,  but   some  farm  animals   too   old  to   work   are satisfactory.

The strips  were  seasoned  with soy sauce  and salt,  then air  dried and grilled over a low heat from burning ox dung. Today, a gas heater is used, but it is said that huobianzi that is cured over ox dung has “a special  fragrance.”  It  is  served  with  a  vegetable  oil  containing  hot peppers.

Meanwhile, the wealthy salt merchants went for more exotic fare. In China,  the  more  obscure  the  ingredients  and the  more  arcane  the method, the more status the dish has. “Soaked frog” was a specialty for Zigong salt merchants. A few pieces of wood would be floated in a large  jar of brine.  Live  frogs  would  be put  in the  jar, and they would desperately  perch  on the  pieces  of  wood. The jar  was  closed  and sealed. After six months, the jar would be opened, and the frogs would be  dead  and dried  on the  wood but  preserved  because   they  had dipped in the salt. They would then be steamed.

The salt merchants were also fond of stir-fried frog stomachs. Unfortunately, a frog’s stomach, however tasty it might be, does not go a  long  way.  It   is  said  in  Zigong  that  to  get one  serving  of  fried stomachs, a cook would kill 1,000 frogs.

THE  CHINESE  CONTINUED percussion  drilling  in  Zigong  even after  the American  oil  industry  had developed  much faster  techniques.  Their homegrown technology was slow but reached depths that, even in the age of petroleum, were astounding. In the 1920s, the Chinese drilled a well to 4,125 feet, and in 1966, the Shen Hai well, a record breaker in

1835, was drilled even deeper to 4,400 feet, about four-fifths of a mile.

The Chinese  character  for jing, meaning  “well,” is  a depiction of a Zigong  derrick.  The  derricks,  towers  of  gray,  weather-beaten  tree trunks lashed together high in the air, rigged with bamboo leaf ropes, dotted the Zigong landscape the way oil wells do in petroleum cities.

In 1892, Sichuan salt makers discovered the layer of rock  salt that feeds  the  groundwater  under Zigong.  Today, Zigong  produces  more rock salt than brine  salt. But in the  first few decades  of the  twentieth century, between 300 and 400 brine wells were operating in Zigong.

The beginning of the end for the ancient Sichuan salt industry came belatedly in 1943, when for the  first time  a rotary drill, bore  a well in Sichuan.  It   took  another  twenty  years  for  the  change  to  become apparent.  In 1960, Zigong  was still  a backward  provincial  town of a third  of  a  million people  living  among medieval  brine  derricks.  That year, the last percussion-drilled shaft in Sichuan was completed. Along with modern rotary drills and rock salt mining, Sichuan salt producers were soon using vacuum evaporators, making modern white salt with crystals of a uniform size.

It  was in the 1960s that Zigong got its first “modern” public transportation. As brine boiling was fading, Sichuan engineers found a new use for the  natural gas  at  the  wells.  Buses  were  built  with giant gray bladders on the roofs, filled with the local natural gas. They started out on their routes with the huge rectangular bladder on top almost as big as the bus. The big bladder swayed and jiggled like Jell-O as the bus rounded corners, and then it gradually deflated, the gray bag sagging from the roof, as the gas was used up. Locals call the buses da qi bao, which means “big  bag of gas.”  The buses  need frequent refueling. Today, with Zigong  tripled  in population, the  old buses  are considered an embarrassing eyesore, and the remaining ones are left with the undesirable rural routes.

Zigong Salt History Museum

ZIGONG IS NOW a sprawling city of 1 million people, including residents of the suburbs. Stone-edged holes in the ground are all that remains of many wells. Only a few derricks are left standing in the hilly municipality, though many were not torn down  until the 1990s, some as recently as 1998. Scholars struggle quixotically to save them, but these are  not good times  for landmark  preservation in a China  passionate about modernization. In 1993, two twin derricks, the symbol of Zigong, one 290 feet high and the  other 284 feet high, were  torn down. They were  dangerously decrepit, and the  government would  not spend the money to  repair  them.  “They didn’t  understand  the  value,  that  these things are only in Zigong,” said Song Liangxi, a Zigong historian.

The Shen Hai well, the rugged old contraption of tree trunks and rocks,  still operates. As with hundreds  of wells  that  once pumped in Zigong, the threshold to the front gate is two feet high—to symbolically keep  the   wealth  inside.  The  well  has  ten  workers,  who  keep  it operating twenty-four hours a day. A cable slowly lowers into the earth for several minutes  and then emerges  with a long  wet bamboo tube that is held over a tub by a worker who pokes the leather valve at the bottom of the tube, releasing several bucket-loads of brine. The brine is  still evaporated  in pans heated  by the  gas  from the  well.  In 1835, when the  well was drilled, it had an estimated  8,500 cubic  meters  of gas.  In  the  year  2000, the  operators  believed  it  had  1,000 cubic meters left.

The Shaanxi  guild  hall remained  a guild  hall until the  fall of the  last emperor. Then it became  a local headquarters for the Chinese nationalist movement of Chiang Kai-shek. After the Communists came to power, Deng Xiaoping, a native of Sichuan who became secretary general of the Chinese Communist Party, decided to make it a salt museum.

Today in Zigong, there are still some crumbling tile-roofed  Chinese houses with the  roof tips  turned  up in the  southern style, but most of them   are   in   disrepair,   seemingly   awaiting   demolition.   The  new

buildings  seem kitschy spoofs  on urban high-rise  architecture. As in Beijing, historic monuments were torn down to make way for buildings that will never be completed, that remain concrete and exposed steel rods  because  the  companies  building  them  went  bankrupt.  But  the guild hall is preserved as a national monument.

Of greater interest to the locals than the guild hall is the small amount of salt  still  made at  the  Shen Hai  well.  They call  it  flat  pan salt  and believe it is better for pickling than the industrial salt made in vacuum evaporators. Paocai and zhacai makers want flat pan salt for their pickled vegetables. It is sold in the Zigong market, but outside of Zigong,  this  medium-grained,  untreated  salt  is  becoming  difficult  to find. Zhang Jianxin at the  Sichuan Zigong  Tongxin Food Corporation

wants flat pan salt for his huobianzi and other products such as larou, a

traditional Sichuan cured  pork. Zhang Jianxin’s  recipe  for larou is  as

follows:

Cut pork into pieces any size. Cover with salt and spices including huajiao, leave it a week, wash off the salt, hang it four feet above a charcoal fire and smoke it slowly for two days. Add peanut shells and sugarcane trimmings to the charcoal. People at home add cypress leaves.

But  Zhang Jianxin has trouble  finding  a salt  that  he wants  to  use. “Vacuum salt is  too  fine-grained  and also  they add chemical things  I don’t like,” he said. The added chemical to which he referred is iodine, which he said has a taste that “is bad for our product.”

SICHUAN PROVINCE IS the size of France with twice the population. In the mid–twentieth century, when the  Chinese  population expanded at an unprecedented  rate, the  number  of inhabitants in Sichuan grew to  its current 100 million people, most of them crowded into the eastern half of the province. The west is a desert leading to Tibet. Sichuan also has a bamboo mountain forest that is home to the earth’s only remaining wild panda population. But most of the province is subtropical, like the American South.

The Sichuan landscape is a tribute to the water management skills of the  heirs  of Li Bing, the  third century B.C. governor, with dikes  and sluices  breaking  up waterways  into  a lush green quilt of flooded  rice paddies, dark-soiled vegetable patches, cypress groves, and bamboo stands. Soil erosion is rare and wasted space  even rarer. But despite this   rich   agriculture,   the   farmers   seem   poor.   They  produce   an enormous quantity of food, but in their villages built along the dirt trails that connect paddies and fields, there are too many people. They live in patched and crumbling mud-and-straw houses, a few still decorated with huge posters of Mao.

Children hike miles to school along the dikes between rice paddies and  up  into   the   green   mountains.   Women  with   brightly   colored parasols carry children on their backs in wicker strap-on seats that are made only in Sichuan. A frequent sight in the Sichuan countryside, one seen in Marco  Polo’s  China,  is  noodles  more  than seven feet  long, hung out to dry like laundry on a line.

Although most of the big derricks have been torn down, a few small brine   wells   remain.   One  in   Dayin,   west   of  the   Sichuan   capital, Chengdu, had a single  post the  height of a telephone  pole. The well was only 1,000 feet deep, a considerable  depth by any but Chinese standards, but at that relatively shallow depth the brine was weak, only

10 percent salt. That was why the Chinese learned deep drilling.

A farmer  in a worn blue  Mao jacket who grew grains, vegetables, and sweet potatoes on the land said that in the 1960s salt had been his  most  profitable  crop. Asked who built  the  well,  he shrugged  and said, “Oh, that well has been there forever.”

The blue jackets, which during the 1950s and 1960s were the only clothes  available  in China,  along  with matching  pants  and caps,  are still commonly seen in the  countryside. It  is  not a political statement, just people too poor for new clothes. The matching pants are seldom seen anymore. Pants wear out, but a good jacket lasts forever.

The Dayin well.

Next to  the  pole  at the  Dayin well, there  was a stone  stool. A lone farmer would sit on the stone with his feet peddling a bamboo wheel, which would raise and lower a bamboo tube into the 1,000-foot hole. The  brine  was  piped  into  a  tank,  over  which  stood  a  much larger bamboo wheel about ten feet tall, with bamboo cups lashed to its rim. This  larger  wheel  was  turned  by a  man walking  carefully  inside  the wheel, a simpler version of the medieval wheel in Salsomaggiore. The wheel would  scoop up the  brine  and drop  it on top  of a wall of dried branches. As the  brine  dribbled  down the  branches, with the  help  of wind and sun, it would become more concentrated. After it dripped into the  tank  below, it was ready to  be boiled  for evaporation. Since  this well had no natural gas, coal, which is abundant in the area, was used for fuel.

In 1998,  the government salt corporation sealed the well, capped the small hole in the ground with concrete, along with many other wells in the area, and ruled that such salt was substandard and illegal to sell.

“But there’s still brine there,” the farmer insisted.

By the  standards  of Chinese  history,  salt  producers  are  no longer tightly controlled. The tax is on selling, not producing, and it is no longer a major source of revenue. But the iodine requirement, the reason the little  well  in  Dayin  was  capped,  is  often  seen  as  a  new form  of government control of salt.

The World Health Organization and UNICEF urge salt producers to include  iodine  in  their  salt  to  prevent  goiter,  an enlargement  of  the thyroid  gland.  Since  everyone  uses  salt,  it  is  an ideal  distribution vehicle. They claim that 1 billion people worldwide are at risk of iodine deficiency.  In  addition  to  thyroid  enlargement, symptoms  of  iodine deficiency can include nervousness, increased and irregular heart rate, and  muscle  weakness.  Iodine  deficiency  can  also  lead  to  mental disability in children.

Iodine  was  used  to  cure  goiter  even before  it  was  known to  be iodine. Humphry Davy, among others, had suspected that iodine was an element, but it was Jean-Baptiste Dumas, the French chemist and founder of one of the first schools of industry in France, who, in 1819, proved  that iodine  was present in natural sponge, which had been a standard treatment for goiter.

In  treating  goiter,  once  again,  China  was  centuries  ahead  of  the West. A fourth-century- A.D. Chinese physician, Ko Hung, prescribed an alcoholic extract from seaweed  for goiter. Many seaweeds  are rich in iodine, which is  why the  Japanese,  who not only eat a great deal of seaweed  but fertilize crops with it, have had relatively little experience with the disease. In China, as in most of Asia, goiter has little history in coastal regions but has often been problematic in mountainous interior provinces, including Sichuan.

American salt  is  usually iodized.  The British,  having  few  cases  of goiter, do not iodize, and the French sometimes, but not always, iodize their salt. Among afflicted populations, iodized salt is well appreciated.

Myanmar, formerly Burma, has an iodized salt policy, but the tribesmen in the remote highlands cannot get the treated salt and instead trade illegally across the Chinese border for it. In exchange for Chinese salt, which they believe  will help  with their  goiter  problem, they offer  rare, endangered wildlife species. The Chinese value these animals for folk medicine. The tongues  of the  antelopelike  serow are  thought to  cure headaches,  and the  nimble  legs  of goatlike  gorals  are  ground into  a powder used on aching joints. Rare Himalayan black bears are killed for  their  gall  bladders,  which  are  used  to  treat  liver  and stomach ailments.  The  commerce  across  the  Myanmar  border  is  especially tragic  because  much of this  black-market  Chinese  salt  is  in fact  not iodized and so will not help them with their goiter problem.

Iodized salt has become controversial in developing countries where government control of salt is  a historic  issue. In 1998, India  followed China’s 1995 decision and, under pressure from the world health community, banned the  sale  of noniodized  salt. In both countries, the move was popular with health authorities, doctors, and scientists, but very unpopular with small independent salt producers.

As China  became  a modern state, its  salt became  modern salt— small uniform grains with iodine added. And like other modern people, the  Chinese  have started  longing  for salt that is  a bit more  irregular, perhaps less pure. Impurities are things that were 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 the  Jewish religion, most rabbis  state that salt must be non-iodized to be considered kosher for Passover.

In Sichuan, wary consumers  insist that iodine  gives  salt a peculiar taste. But small producers also suspect that the ban is a government conspiracy to put them out of business and once again give state salt companies a monopoly. Peasants, such as the family at the little foot- operated well that was capped in rural Dayin, do not have the knowledge or money to meet government standards for iodized salt.

In September 2000, the Indian government repealed its ban on noniodized salt under pressure from Hindu nationalists and Gandhians who recalled Gandhi’s assertion that every Indian had a right to make salt. But the Chinese authority did not seem inclined to go back on its decision to ban noniodized salt. Li Fude of the government salt agency for Sichuan Province, the General Sichuan Salt Company, said, “It was decreed by the prime minister himself.” He said it like an ancient bureaucrat speaking of the emperor.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Ma, La, and Mao

THE CHINESE HAVE been slow to part not only with their emperors but with many  ancient ideas. Among  the lingering old ways in modern China are attitudes about food—about salt and seasoning and how to construct a meal. Many of these ideas, though notably different from current Western thought, did exist in the pre-Rennaissance West. The differences between China and the West on food are far greater today than 1,000 years ago.

The Chinese seem ready to eat anywhere and anytime. City streets and rural roads are lined with food stalls. On the trans-Siberian railroad that runs from Moscow to Beijing, the heater at the end of cars that the Russians use to make tea is used by the Chinese to prepare whole meals.  They crowd   into  the   dark,  closetlike   space  and  chop vegetables and spread out seasonings. Not only do they cook and eat onstantly, but they talk a great deal about the meaning of their foods.

Food sometimes  seems a Chinese  obsession,  and the  culture at times seems almost afflicted with epicurism.

The contemporary Chinese novelist Lu Wenfu wrote:

The word gourmet is pleasing to the ear, perhaps also to the eye. If you explain it in simple everyday language, however, it’s not so appealing: A gourmet is a person who is totally devoted to eating.—Lu Wenfu, The Gourmet, 1979

In China, southern food, especially Cantonese, is usually said to be the best. But after 1949, when Mao Zedong  from Hunan and Deng 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.

In 1959,  a restaurant  for the  political elite  was established  in a Beijing   house of  gardened   courtyards   built  for  the   son  of  a seventeenth-century emperor. Predictably, it was a Sichuan restaurant, and was simply named the Sichuan Restaurant. Zhou Enlai, the long-time premier, and Deng Xiaoping were  regulars. For  years  it  was considered one of the few good restaurants in Communist Beijing.

The restaurant remained a symbol of the times when, in 1996, its antique setting was bought by a Hong Kong entrepreneur, who turned the  house into  a private  members-only  club  with the  obsequious gentlemanly service reminiscent of British colonialism. The so-called Chinese  takeover  of  Hong Kong has  in  fact  meant  that  many Communist  Party  relics  have  been bought  up  by Hong Kong entrepreneurs.  The Sichuan  Restaurant  has survived  in three  less sumptuous Beijing locations. Its head chef, Yu Jiamin, is a native of Beijing who, in 1970, at age nineteen, began apprenticing in Sichuan cuisine. “For me, it is the most complete cuisine, the only one that completely uses six flavors,” he said.

The notion  of  balancing  principal  flavors  is  central  to  Chinese cooking.

The six of Sichuan food are expressed as a musical jingle:

“ma, la, tian, suan, xian, ku.” Ma, the spicy huajiao, is the sixth flavor unique to Sichuan, though la, hot peppers, is also typical of the area.

Tian, meaning  “sweet,” suan, meaning  “sour,” xian, meaning “salty,” and ku, meaning “bitter,” are universal.

Each dish will have a flavor, or ideally a combination of flavors, ma-la being the most famous Sichuan combination. Xian, salty, is the most used flavor, a central motif. It is considered a balance to all the others.

Salt is believed to bring out sweetness and moderate sourness. In ancient  times,  tea  was prepared  in Sichuan  with  salt  and ginger added. Salty and spicy, xian-la, is such a popular Sichuan combination that it has been bottled in the form of soy sauce  and hot peppers. Xian- la  is  also  a recurrent  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.

In  China,  meals  are  put  together   by counterbalancing   these combinations.   Balance,   making   a  complete   flavor   by blending opposites,  like combining  an acid  and a base in chemistry,  is  an ancient concept in cooking. The fourth-century-B.C. Chinese belief that the world is made up of two opposing forces, yin and yang, has long been applied to cooking. The Chinese classify foods into warm and cold according to their attributes, not their temperature, similar to the way Europeans classified and balanced foods in the Middle Ages. All cooks do not agree on which foods are hot and which cold, but fat meat, hot spices, and alcohol are usually thought to be hot, while bland vegetables and fruit are  usually considered  cold. In the  West, such ideas trace back at least to Hippocrates in fifth-century-B.C. Greece.

Some scholars believe the idea originated in Greece and spread to Asia  through India. Others argue  that different cultures  thought of it independently.   Some   scholars   believe   that   indigenous   North Americans held these beliefs before the arrival of Europeans. Such ideas were the basis of the Church’s lean and fat day interdictions. But in time they degenerated in Europe to such frivolousness as Grimod de La Reynière’s  distinction between blond and brunette food—as with women, he preferred his food blond.

Ancient concepts  such as hot and cold  foods are  still  seriously discussed in China. Dishes that are ma-la or dishes that are very salty are contrasted with bland dishes. But also tian, sweet, is considered a good counterbalance  to ma-la. Tian shao bai, which literally means “sweet white stew,” consists of thick bacon  strips stuffed with sweet bean paste on a bed of sweet rice and sprinkled with sugar. Like many Chinese dishes, this sounds repugnant by itself. But a bite of tian shao bai is a perfect moment, almost an antidote, when the mouth is aflame from a bite of a ma-la dish.

This idea of using sweet as a countermeasure to salty or spicy used to be common in the West. Apicius prescribed adding honey to a dish that is too salty. Pliny phrased it in reverse: “Salt corrects our aversion when we find something over-sweet.” In medieval Catalonia, salt cod was served with  honey. Platina prescribed sweetness as a counterbalance to la: “Sugar softens and tempers all dishes of hot and aromatic spices.” This is the reason the people of Collioure make their spicy sweet Banyuls wine to accompany  their salty anchovies. 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.

When the  dessert  idea  was first  taking  hold,  a  dessert  was sometimes served at the end of each “course,” and a course was often a combination of dishes. In China, a course is still an assortment of foods in the middle of the table, often on a large rotating disk, a lazy Susan, which makes all the  platters  easily  accessible.  People  sit around the table with only a small plate or bowl and with chopsticks take a bite of one then another dish, mixing the combinations—a bite or two of hot, then a taste of sweet.

In all of the courses, vegetables play a significant role. In Sichuan, wild mountain vegetables such as mushrooms are a specialty, as are numerous   varieties   of  bamboo shoots   eaten  raw,   cooked, or preserved in salt.

The first course is usually an assortment of foods  that are cold in temperature,  the  second an assortment  of  heated  ones. The last course, especially in Sichuan, where by this point the palate has been through a great deal, is bland, usually a very bland soup. Sometimes a course of white rice is served before the soup with very salty paocai.

Rice is usually not served with the other courses. Except among the very poor, many meals do not include rice at all.

HISTORIANS   DEBATE  EXACTLY why food  in  China  is  seasoned with products fermented or pickled in salt, and not with grains of salt added directly to food. The idea of producing saltiness without the direct use of salt is Asian, though  it is not that different from the Roman  use of garum. The following recipe for the Sichuan classic huiguorou is an example of cooking  with salted condiments—in  this case three—but without using salt directly. The recipe is by Huang Wengen, a cooking instructor at the only accredited school of cooking in China, which is in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan.

For authentic huiguorou you must have these ingredients:

pork thigh, garlic greens, douban, dousi, soy sauce, sugar, and msg.

Boil the ham until it is nearly cooked. Cool it. Cut thin slices perpendicular to the bone.

Chop garlic greens.

In a wok with mixed vegetable oil:

Stir-fry meat until the slices begin to curl a little.

Add douban and dousi. When the sauce turns reddish add soy sauce and a pinch of sugar  and a pinch of msg (use small amounts of all these ingredients). Finish with the chopped garlic greens.

Like so many Chinese dishes, this one uses pork. The eighteenth- century French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon speculated that the reason Islamic proselytizing was not very successful in China was the Islamic rejection of pork. The Chinese not only cook fresh pork but also have a long tradition of salt-curing  pork into bacons, hams, and sausages. In 1985, the pig population of China was estimated to be 331 million, which is far greater than that of any other country in the world. According to a survey of rural China conducted from 1929 to 1933, pork and pig lard accounted for 70 percent  of animal calories consumed. The cooking oil, usually a blend of sesame, peanut, and other vegetable oils, that is used in so much Chinese cooking is often a modern, healthier substitute for pork fat.

According  to  Huang Wengen, “You  cannot  cook Sichuan  food without douban. We went to France, and I brought douban because the douban  in France  is  no good. It was a six-week  cultural exchange program of cooking  teachers—a school near Lille by the narrowest part  of  the  Channel,  Le Touquet.  But  it  was impossible  to  teach Sichuan without the products. Huajiao, for example. We brought what we needed that was practical to carry: huajiao, douban, dousi, zhacai.” All  of  these  irreplaceable  ingredients  except  huajiao  are  salt products. Zhacai is vegetables in salt. Douban is a bean paste from a big, flat, green soybean that is dried until it turns hard and yellow and is then fermented with salt and hot pepper. Dousi is a black paste made from fermented yellow beans, very salted but without chili.

Another ingredient seen by the Chinese as a salt alternative is MSG, or monosodium glutamate. While it has no flavor of its own, for reasons that are not completely understood MSG brings out flavors that exist in foods, especially the flavor of salt.

Yu Jiamin at Bejing’s Sichuan Restaurant said, “MSG is a different flavor than salt but also brings out flavor the way salt does.”

As more Westerners visit their country, many Chinese cooks are growing frustrated by what they see as a Western prejudice against MSG. Liu Tong, a cooking instructor of the Sichuan Cooking School in Chengdu, said, “It is not a chemical. It is made from fermentation of cereal. We have always used it in Chinese food.”

Actually, the Chinese  have not always  used it, but the Japanese have. In food  history,  MSG swam upstream,  from Japan to China, instead of the reverse direction of most Asian food. Traditionally, the Japanese got  it naturally  from  a seaweed known  in Japanese as kombu and in the  West as laminaria.  MSG was first isolated as a substance—a sodium salt of glutamic acid—in a Japanese laboratory in 1908. Since  the 1950s, it  has been made by fermenting wheat gluten.

Liu Tong said that MSG was needed because Chinese food does not directly use salt.

THERE  ARE  NUMEROUS Chinese  salt  and bean condiments  such as douban and dousi, and the Japanese have their own assortment. But the most important is the ancient soy sauce. In China, schoolchildren learn a jingle from the Middle Ages with the seven  necessities needed every day: firewood, rice, oil, salt, soy sauce, vinegar, and tea.

In  China,  there  is  an ancient  tradition  of  soy sauce made by peasants, but such sauce is becoming a rarity. Today, in both China and Japan, soy sauce is made in factories. Most Chinese say that it is a complicated process and the factories do it as well as the peasants ever  did. Anyone who has tasted  the  thick peasant  product might dispute this. Huang Wengen, for one, said the old farm product was incomparably better. The farmers in Dayin said they stopped making soy sauce in the early 1990s, even when they were still pumping brine with foot pedals. They said it was too much work and that factories sell it so cheaply, they could not compete.

But by a strange twist of economics, an artisanal soy sauce is still made in the Sichuan town of Lezhi. Lezhi is a provincial town whose main street has almost no traffic other than busy little three-wheeled bicycle rickshaws. And yet most of the old buildings have been torn down and replaced with what is becoming China’s ubiquitous white tile

architecture. At night it looks as if a tricycle gang has taken over the deserted streets of an abandoned housing project.
 

The Lezhi Fermented Product Corporation was a private factory that was nationalized after the 1949 Communist takeover, known here as “the liberation.” The state factory made an industrial soy sauce. But in 1999, in a fit of privatization, the state announced  that it was no longer going to produce soy sauce in Lezhi. Since no one was interested in buying the company, its 100 workers were given severance pay and left  jobless.  Ten of  them  used their settlement  money  to  buy the company. In  order  to  get  operating  capital,  they  sold the  large downtown plant and moved up a three-flight outdoor mud-and-stone stairway to a storage area on a hilltop at the edge of town.

They no longer had the equipment or the capital to be an industry.

So they decided they would have to make their soy sauce the way peasants used to make it. Xu Qidi, the general manager, said, “We had to start all over. This is the old way to do it.”

Factories use the crushed refuse from soy oil production for making soy sauce, but the new Lezhi company uses fresh whole beans that are steamed until soft. The beans are then placed in a storage room on flat, round, straw trays that are about four feet in diameter. Yeast is then added. The trays  are  left  on bamboo racks  in the  concrete storage room for three days, until mold forms on top.

At  this  point,  factories  speed up the  fermentation  process  by delaying the addition of salt and keeping the beans in heated bins. But in Lezhi the moldy beans are mixed with water and salt and stored in big, three-foot-deep crocks. The pots are left outdoors to ferment for six months  to a year  or longer,  depending  on weather  conditions.

When  it rains, they are covered with coneshaped  lids made of sewn palm fronds. Eventually, the paste looks like mud. Water is added, and the  mush is  slowly  filtered  through piping.  Then it  is  sterilized  by steaming.

Some sauces are darker, some lighter, some thicker, some thinner. The best Lezhi sauce is not quite as thick as its number two product, but  it is  black,  caramelly,  and complex. Differences  in sauces are determined  by the  length of fermentation and the  amount  of water added at the end.

In Lezhi, soy sauce is still sold the old-fashioned way: Customers bring their own bottles, and the sauce is ladled out of crocks. But it is also marketed under the label Wo Bo, which is the name of a local bridge. A room in the dank little factory has a shiny new machine, the only shiny new thing in the  plant. The handful of people  that is  the company, some in  suit  and tie,  others   in  workers’  clothes,  all entrepreneurs  of  the  new China,  look  on with  excitement  as this machine seals soy sauce into plastic bags to be sold out of town.

CHINA IS  CHANGING quickly. The gray and red courtyard buildings of Beijing, some 500 years old, are being torn down at a pitiless rate. In the glare of neon lights that now explode in the sky every night on top of the capital’s new high-rise buildings, are Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s  advertisements. Fried  chicken has been easier  to sell than hamburgers, because the Chinese have been eating fried chicken for centuries.

Guo Zhenzhong, a sixty-three-year-old professor who lives in a small apartment stacked floor-to-ceiling  with books in a ten-year-old apartment block that already looks eighty years old, does not fit perfectly into this new China. He dresses simply, studies his books, takes great pleasure in traveling to international academic conferences, and appears not to have heard the news that China has switched to a market  economy. He cares litHe for the new consumerist China  with  its  Western  labels,  both  real  and  fraudulent.  Like  most Chinese,  he still eats  the old foods.  He once  went to a McDonald's.

What did he think of it?

He shook his head disapprovingly and said, "No vegetables."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

More Salt than Fish

THE  IDEA   THAT salt  enhances  the   taste   of  sugar  has  not  entirely vanished from the West. It is a guiding concept of the snack food industry. A clear example of this is honey-roasted peanuts, but in fact salt and sugar are ingredients in most industrial snack food.

Before  refrigeration, when butter  was preserved  with considerable quantities of salt, sugar was thought to counteract and even mask the saltiness.

Since  tasting  is  all that is  needed to  detect oversalting, some merchants try to mask this taste by adding a little sugar. So in tasting salted butter, if you detect a sweet or sugary taste, don’t buy it.—Francis    Marre: Défendez  votre  estomac  contre  les fraudes  alimentaires Protect your stomach against food fraud, Paris, 1911

Curiously, the  concept of sugar  counteracting  salt still flourishes  in Sweden, a country which imports both its salt and its sugar, and perhaps  for that reason gives  them  equal regard. The first record  of sugar  in Sweden is  from 1324, when, for a funeral  of the  wealthiest man in the country, 1.5 kilo sugar, 1.5 kilo pepper, .5 kilo saffron—all exotic luxuries—were imported.

According to Carl Jan Granqvist, a well-known Swedish restaurateur and food commentator, “Sugar brings out the saltiness of salt.” Cakes are made with salt. Breads are made with sugar. In September, when crayfish are in season in Sweden, they are served with salt, sugar, and dill. Sugar and 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.

For newcomers to Scandinavia, one of the more infamous uses  of sockersaltad   is salt  lakrits,  salted  licorice  candy, which  sometimes comes in the  shape of herring, sometimes in laces, or in a gumdrop shape, called a salt bomber, with salt sprinkled on top. A salt lakrits– coated vanilla ice cream, sold on a stick, is a lakrits puck, though the manufacturer, GB Glace, said  it was made with ammonium chloride, not sodium chloride, which does not seem at all reassuring. Swedes often  mention  salt  lakrits  as  the  one thing  they  miss  when they  go abroad. Other Scandinavians and the Dutch are afflicted with the same craving.

Also high on the list of foods missed by Swedes  abroad is kaviar, a name which purists would see as a travesty, since it contains no sturgeon  eggs.  Kaviar  is  salted  cod roe  mashed with  potatoes  and sold in a squeezable metal tube. The first ingredient listed on the tube is sockersaltad.

The leading use of sockersaltad, and probably the one that has kept the taste in the northern palate, is for curing fish. On the west coast of Sweden,  herring  is  ground with onions  and made into  fritters,  which are served with a sweet currant sauce. One of the most celebrated expressions  of this  Swedish taste  is  gravlax,  literally buried  salmon. Originally, gravlax was salmon that was cured  by being  buried  in the ground  for days or months,  an old Scandinavian technique  used  for preserving  herring  as  well.  The longer  it  is  buried,  the  longer  it  will keep. But, paradoxically, the longer it has been buried, the more it resembles in smell and texture something rotten. Older Icelanders still horrify youth with smelly little chunks of hákarl, buried Greenland shark. Burying produces a very smelly fish rejected by most of the public. The Swedes  have maintained the popularity of gravlax by replacing it with salmon cured with salt and sugar.

HERRING STILL COMES and goes in the Baltic and the North Sea  in ways no one can predict. The sea between Norway, Denmark, and Sweden is  called  the  Skagerrak. Klädesholmen, a flat rocky island  only yards off the Swedish coastline in the Skagerrak, has had only six good herring runs recorded in all of history. The first was in the sixteenth century. Then the herring went away and did not return until 1780. From 1780 to  1808, Klädesholmen  was  awash with  herring.  The villagers boiled herring in water, and the oil that rose to the surface lit the street- lamps of Paris and London.

In those years, while herring seemed to be vanishing from the Norwegian coastline, the large population on the tiny island of Klädesholmen were fishing and processing herring, as well as cod and ling.   The   two   boiling   plants,   owned  by  wealthy   Göteborg   and Stockholm merchants, made oil twenty-four hours  a day. Then, in the early  nineteenth  century,  fewer  herring  showed up each  September. Some  blamed  this  on the  foul smell  of the  island  with its  herring  oil plants   dumping   stinking   waste   back  into   the   sea.   Klädesholmen smelled  so  bad, it  was  said,  that  even the  herring  couldn’t  stand  it. There  was not  another  good run until 1880 to  1900, and there  were none in the twentieth century.

More than 1,000 people lived on the island in the eighteenth century. By the  twenty-first century, the  island  had only 470 inhabitants. In the early twentieth century, hundreds of women had been employed cutting up herring for canning, wearing aprons made from Cuban sugar sacks waterproofed  with  linseed  oil.  Men mixed  salt  for  the  herring  with Cuban sugar, then added  sandalwood, ginger, cloves, mace, coriander, cinnamon, allspice, oregano, dill, and bay leaf.

In the 1980s, there were 200 herring workers. Today, more herring is produced with fewer than 100 people working for eight herring canneries, all of them family-owned businesses. For the small companies  on Klädesholmen,  it  is  more  economic  to  buy barrels  of fish from one of two  companies  that  now process  herring  for all  of Sweden.  They buy herring  and cure  it in  a brine  in which,  for every thirteen kilos of salt, nine kilos of sugar are added.

Klädesholmens Museum

At the big herring plants, decisions about these formulas are still made by the brine mixer, who, like the master salters on the old-time cod vessels, has the highest salary.

But life  has changed in all of Sweden. Until a lumber boom in the mid–nineteenth century it was one of Europe’s poorest countries. Before the 1960s and 1970s, the only refrigeration in a Swedish kitchen was cabinets with holes to the outdoors in the wall. Historically, salted provisions got Sweden through its long winters, and traditional Scandinavian food  is  very salty. A Swedish sausage  is  coated  in a white layer of salt. In Sweden, Äppelfläsk used to be made in the fall when the  apples came in. They were  sliced  and sauteed  in salt pork and sugar syrup. But today, everywhere in Scandinavia, as in much of the rest of northern Europe and North America, people are eating less salt and less salted foods. Few eat Äppelfläsk anymore.

Some of the disappearing uses of salt seem so strange it is difficult to understand why they were ever popular. Snus is tobacco and salt. It was molded into a wad with the fingers, jammed up between the cheek and gum, and sucked  on for an entire  day; fresheners  were  added every hour or so. Some even put it in before going to bed and woke up at night for a fresh wad. And even the Swedes  wonder at the habit of the Laplander in the far north, drinking salted coffee.

SALT   CONSUMPTION   IS declining  in  most  of  the  world.  The  average twentieth-century   European   consumed  half   as   much  salt   as   the average  nineteenth-century European.  But  there  is  still  a love  of salt cod, herring, hams, sausages, olives, pickles, duck, and goose preserved in salt—foods that are no longer necessary. Salt cod is sometimes sold only slightly salted so that it requires less soaking, though this convenience is at the expense of quality. Some salt cod is so lightly salted that it is kept frozen, which makes little sense economically or gastronomically. 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. Since salt curing has lost its function as a way to  preserve  meat, the  paradoxical notion of “fresh ham” has appeared.  By Swedish law,  a ham that  is  salted  in September cannot be called a “fresh Christmas ham.” But a ham that is frozen in September and thawed and salted on December 17 is a “fresh Christmas ham.”

In North America, the Jewish delicatessen is a citadel of salt- preserved foods—foods that could just as easily be purchased fresh, including   pickled   cucumbers   and  tomatoes,   salted   and  smoked salmon, carp, whitefish, and sable, and cured meats such as tongue, pastrami, and corned beef. Pastrami, of Romanian origin, is dried, spiced, and salted beef, smoked over hardwood sawdust and then steamed.  The name may come from pastra,  the  Romanian  verb  “to preserve.” It  is  available  in every delicatessen, but most famously as the specialty of Schwartz’s in Montreal. Schwartz’s and its pastrami is such an institution in Montreal that after the controversial 1977 Bill 101 required store names to be in French—a language that does not use apostrophes—Schwartz’s was one of the few allowed to keep its apostrophe. But it had to change from being a “Hebrew delicatessen” to a charcuterie Hébraïque.

While  the  Jews and the  delicatessens  are  concentrated  in eastern North  America,  much of  their  fish  is  taken  from  the  Pacific.  Great Lakes  carp  is  becoming  rarer,  and an inexpensive  substitute  was salted and smoked sable or sablefish, a huge, deepwater Pacific fish. In the Pacific Northwest, it is known as black cod, though it is nothing like a cod and belongs to a uniquely northern Pacific family. Now that it has become fashionable in the United States and Japan to eat black cod, it is becoming rarer too and cured sable is no longer inexpensive. Though curing salmon is an ancient tradition everywhere that the fish is found, Jews who learned of it in Germany and central Europe, where it had long been a popular food, did much to popularize it in the world. It   was  through  the  Jewish  immigrant  neighborhoods  of  Paris  after World War II that cured salmon became a staple item of Paris charcuteries.  In  New  York  also,  it   was  the   early-twentieth-century central European Jews of Manhattan’s crowded Lower East Side who first established cured salmon as a New York food and then an American food.

The  popular   Jewish   cured   salmon   was   called lox,   Yiddish  for salmon,  from  the   German lachs.  Lox is  salt-cured  salmon,  usually Pacific   salmon.   In   the   nineteenth   century,   the   Pacific   Northwest became a leading center for cured salmon for both the East and West. The booming fur trade of the region bought large quantities of salt. The merchants  in the  Northwest found  that salted  salmon sold  well in the world and that  the  ships  bringing  in salt  could  buy salted  salmon for their return cargo.

Hawaii  was  a  salt  supplier  for  the  Northwest.  Like  many Pacific islands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Hawaii had an important trade provisioning whalers and other ships with salt and salted  meats.  Hawaii  produced  sea  salt  in  inland  lakes,  the  most famous  of which  was  a  volcanic  crater  rumored  to  be bottomless— evidently not true  since  the  drained  salt lake  is  now in Honolulu  filled with high-rise buildings. Hawaiians traded salt in the Northwest and in turn bought  salted  salmon,  a hard product  that  required  soaking  like salt cod. Hawaiians still mix soaked salt salmon with tomatoes, a dish they   call lomilomi.  The  word  means  “massage”  and  refers  to  the process of flaking the salt fish.

Salt-cured  lox, once the  leading  cured  salmon, has in recent years been almost completely abandoned for the  less  salty Nova, a lighter cure, soaked in brine and then smoked. In recent decades  there has been a mantra among Jewish shoppers, “Get the Nova; the lox is too salty.” The name comes from Nova Scotia, though most Nova originally came  from  the  nearby  Gaspé  Peninsula  of  Quebec.  Now there  is western  Nova, made from  Pacific  salmon,  because  Atlantic  salmon has all but disappeared except for farmed varieties. Moe Greengrass, owner  of a popular  Jewish smoked fish store  on Manhattan’s  Upper West Side started by his father in 1929, said, “Nobody buys lox anymore—we sell 100 pounds of Nova and 5 pounds of lox per week.” Moe’s father, Barney, who had worked in fish stores on the Lower East Side before opening his West Side store, was one of those who had made lox a  New York food  back when New Yorkers  liked  their  fish salty.

ANCHOVY IS A fish that has remained more popular salted than fresh, but because  salting is no longer a necessity, it has become considerably less salty. J.-B. Reboul, the nineteenth-century Provençal chef, is credited  as  one  of  the  first  to  use  anchovies  creatively,  inventing anchovy patés and several pastries with anchovy fillings. He also wrote one of the great recipes of a Provençal classic: anchoïade.

After having washed seven or eight anchovies, let them soak several minutes in water to desalinate; having separated the fillets from their  bones place  them  in a dish with several  spoonfuls  of olive  oil, a pinch of pepper,  two  or three  garlic  cloves  chopped fine, you could also add a splash of vinegar.

Cut a slice about one inch off the top of a pain  de  ménage [or pain  ordinaire—a long, round, typical French bread]. This is the best choice of bread because  it does not easily crumble.

Divide this long slice of bread into two or three pieces: they should be the same.

Make one for each guest. Place some anchovy fillets on each piece and arrange the pieces in a dish.

Cut the remaining bread into small squares. Everybody dips the squares in the prepared oil and then uses the square to crush the fillets on the bread. When it is all crushed together, anchovy and sauce,  you eat the squares of bread that were used for crushing while toasting the slices with crushed anchovy on top; it releases typical flavor that fills with joy all lovers of Provençal cooking and gives pleasure  to  many a gourmet.—J.-B.  Reboul, La cuisinière Provençale, 1910

Another  celebrated  nineteenth-century  Provençal  chef,  M. Morard, wrote, “The laziest of stomachs and the sleepiest of appetites are obviously forced to awaken at the first mouthful of this stimulating slice of bread, made golden with olive oil, awaiting crushed anchovy fillets and chopped garlic,  that  the  culinary mosaic-maker  has so perfectly placed on top.”

IN  1905, HENRI Matisse  and André  Derain  went  to  Collioure,  the  little pink-and-yellow village by the sea, still famous for its anchovies. In one of  the   most   fruitful   summers   in  the   history  of  art, they  produced paintings  of furious  colors.  Derain  painted  a  village  of pure  primary color and Matisse a village of vibrant opposites, turquoise and orange, magenta and gold. They took their paintings to Paris’s Salon d’Automne  that year and created  a sensation, a movement in the  art world known as fauvism.

Visit  the  little  port  of Collioure  today,  a  few  miles  up the  Catalan coast  from  the  Spanish  border,  and  these  works  of  Matisse  and Derain will seem  purely imaginary.  Collioure  is  no longer  a world of brilliant  colors  but  subtle  pastel  walls  where  wisteria  blooms  pale purple and magnolia pink.

What is missing are the fishing boats.

Derain painted  them red  and yellow, their bright red  masts  poking out of the harbor like an autumn grove. Matisse depicted them in a red bunch seen from his  turquoise  window. They were  exaggerating  the colors,  but  the  fishing  boats,  called  catalans,  truly  were  painted  in blazing primary colors. These were the boats of anchovy fishermen.

In 1770, Collioure  had 800 fishermen working  on 140 catalans.  In 1888,  the   number   of  boats   had  declined   by  ten.  The  fishermen observed that anchovies will rise near the surface on a night with a full moon. Reasoning that the fish were attracted by the moon, they started making  their  own moons once  they  had electricity,  and they  called

them lamparos. A lamparo was a huge light on a buoy that was some five feet high, carried out to sea  hanging from a hook mounted at the bow of the boat. On a calm, moonless night, the fishermen would set their nets around the buoys and then turn on a lamparo and wait for the anchovies to gather under it. Then they would haul up a full net.

The catalans would go out every night and bring the catch in every morning for salting. The catches were good, but the more they caught, the farther out to sea fishermen had to go to find anchovies. Fishermen started using big steel-hulled ships for the longer voyage, but such vessels could not dock in Collioure because  the harbor was not deep enough. By 1945, there  were  only twenty-six working  catalans  left  in Collioure. Today, only one catalan sits in Collioure harbor by the medieval walls. It is an unused souvenir of the village’s anchovy industry.

Art  lovers,  wanting  to  see  the  town  Matisse  and Derain  painted, flock  to  Collioure  for the  tourism  season,  which, like  the  old anchovy season, is May to September. But the colors, the fishing boats, are not there. The locals still make Banyuls from their vineyards in the winter, and  in  the  summer,  instead  of  fishing,  there  is  the  tourism.  Two families still salt anchovies in Collioure, using salt from Aigues-Mortes. The anchovies  are  caught  in Port  Vendres,  a  contemporary  hillside monument to industrial efficiency. It has a fleet of vessels that find the schools  with  sonar  and an afternoon  fish  market  that  auctions  the catch. But Matisse would not have painted it.

A NUMBER OF seventeenth-and eighteenth-century writers insist that the heir  to  garum  is  not  anchovy sauces  that  later  became  ketchup,  but salted fish eggs, caviar. Guido Panciroli, who wrote a 1715 book titled History  of  Many Memorable  Things  Lost,  believed,  “Other  types  of garum called bottarga and caviar now take their place.”

The word caviar is of Turkish derivation and refers to the eggs  of the sturgeon—a  prehistoric  animal  that  has  not  evolved  in  180 million years. It is a huge migratory fish that, like the salmon, is anadromous, that is, it lives in saltwater but swims upstream to spawn in the freshwater place of its birth. The eating of its eggs may well be as old as or even older  than the  eating  of garum. Originally, the  eggs  were food   for  fishermen,   cheap   food   because   they  were   not   salable, whereas the fish itself brought high prices. But gradually the eggs gained appreciation. In 1549, their preparation was described by Cristoforo di Messisbugo, a Renaissance food writer from Ferrara:

CAVIAR TO EAT FRESH AND TO CONSERVE

Take sturgeon eggs, the best of which are black. Spread them out on a table using the blade of a knife. Take out the ones that are filmy, weigh the remaining ones and, for every 25 pounds of eggs, add 12 and one half ounces of salt, or one half ounce per pound.

The medieval  rivers  of Europe  were  full of  egg-bearing  sturgeon. They were common  in the Seine, the Gironde, the Thames, the Po, the Danube, the Ebro in northern Spain, and the Guadalquivir in southern Spain. The fish were often a subject of royal privileges. The British monarch, starting with Edward II in the thirteenth century, claims the right to the first sturgeon caught in British waters every year.

France produced caviar since at least the time of Louis XIV, largely from the sturgeon catch on the Gironde River. But sturgeon caught on the  Seine, even in Paris, was a rare  enough event for the  fish to  be presented to kings. Colbert regulated the fishery to preserve the fish, and these laws are still in force. But the fish are gone. Louis XV got a Paris   sturgeon  in  1758  and  Louis   XVI got  one  in  1782. Antonin Carême, the famous early-nineteenth-century French cook, insisted he saw a  220-pound sturgeon  almost  three  yards  long  by the  Pont  de Neuilly on the western edge of Paris. That was one of the last sturgeon sightings in Paris.

Sturgeons, which can weigh up to two tons, have little resistance to industrial pollution. Even the Gironde, the last holdout of French sturgeon,  became  too  polluted,  as  did  the  Hudson and other  great sturgeon rivers of North America.

When Europeans  settled  in North America,  they  recorded  seeing Native Americans catching huge sturgeon. Even 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 soldiers were fed cans of pressed  caviar, which they called  “fish jam” and mostly loathed. A soldier would pay for cans of sardines rather than eat the free fish jam that was issued.

For caviar to have been considered the heir to garum, it had to have been used as a seasoning rather than being eaten by itself. Until the twentieth century, that seems to have been the case. In nineteenth- century Russia,  sauerkraut  was valued  more  than caviar,  and in this recipe the caviar is simply a pleasant salted flavoring for the cabbage:

SOUS IZ KAPUSTY S IKROJ (SAUERKRAUT  WITH CAVIAR)

Boil three pounds shredded sauerkraut, adding only enough water to prevent it from burning. When it has  cooked, drain  in a coarse  sieve. Melt a half pound Finnish butter in a skillet, stir in the sauerkraut, and fry both together. Pour salted water over caviar that has just been removed from a fresh fish, mash it fine, mix with the sauerkraut, and let it boil thoroughly over the fire. The caviar will impart a fine flavor to the sauerkraut. This dish may be served with patties, small sausages, or fried fish. On fast days, substitute olive oil for the Finnish butter. Add enough caviar so that the sauerkraut appears as if it were strewn with poppy seeds.—Elena  Molokhovets, A Gift to Young Housewives, 1897

Apparently,   by  the   early   twentieth   century,   Americans   valued Russian caviar  from the  Caspian Sea.  In 1905, Russia  was in open revolt  against  the  czar,  and in April  1906, an American  publication, Wide World Magazine, warned, “The unrest in Russia, it is feared, will greatly affect  the  caviar  industry.”  The writer  was concerned  that  the cossacks  would get involved in the political unrest and abandon fishing sturgeon.

But the magazine did see reasons for revolt. It reported that the czar forced the cossacks  to give him a yearly tribute of eleven tons of their best caviar and reported  that this  tribute  alone  required  the  killing of 5,000 sturgeon at the start of each season.

The article described the cossacks  in the Russian winter, standing on the  ice  and fishing  through  holes.  It  reported  that  the  eggs  were mixed  with  “the  finest  salt,”  at  a  ratio  of  4  to  5  percent  salt.  The Caspian,  fed  by the  Ural  and Volga  Rivers,  is  the  world’s  largest saltwater lake. Not only does it have sturgeons, it has sea  salt where brackish   water   evaporates   at   the   mouths   and  estuaries   of   the numerous rivers that empty into it.

Before the 1917 revolution, the cossacks  were the dominant caviar producers of the Caspian. They fished sturgeon only twice a year, for two  weeks  each  time,  and the  sturgeon  seemed  inexhaustible.  The entire   cossack   population  participated   in  these   two   brief  fishing seasons.  First,  in  the  autumn,  whole  extended  families  pulled  nets down the Volga River. The second two-week season was in the middle of winter, and this fishery also was on the river. Armed with harpoons, hundreds  of  cossacks   would  stand  on the  ice  of  the  frozen  river awaiting  a  cannon blast  that  was  their  signal  to  pierce  the  ice  and attempt  to  spear  a sturgeon.  The noise  would  drive  the  terrified  fish downstream, and the  cossacks  would  follow with their  harpoons  and cannons while  merchants  from  Moscow, Leningrad,  even Paris  and other European capitals waited for the giant fish to be cut open while still alive.

The  price  has  been  leaping  upward  since  the  beginning  of  the twentieth  century.  From 1900 to  1915, the  price  of  caviar  doubled.

Merchants  began  importing  Russian  caviar,  not  to  mention  French caviar  with  Russian  labels,  to  exclusive  establishments  in  western Europe. This was how the Petrossian family, today one of the leading caviar distributors, got started. Born on the Iranian side of the Caspian, they   grew   up  on  the   Russian   side,   immigrated   to   Paris,   and discovered that Russian things were in vogue with the rich.

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.   Historically  the  Caspian  has always  been controlled  by Russia  from  the  northern  shore  and Iran from the southern shore, giving these two nations a virtual monopoly on caviar. But the  Caspian and the  Russian rivers that feed  it have also been besieged  by pollution. Chemicals  and fishermen have killed  so many sturgeon that by the early 1970s even the Russians were suffering a shortage of caviar. In that decade, increased industrialization in Iran started  threatening  the  Iranian fisheries on the southern  side  of the  lake. At  this  point,  the  price  of caviar  became prohibitive to most people.

Sturgeon is still fished in the Caspian only twice a year, with a larger catch in the spring and a smaller catch in the fall, hauled by net from its habitat in the deepest pockets of the Caspian floor. Once landed on a factory ship, the sturgeon receives, as do many fish caught by man, a clunk on the head. The blow knocks the fish unconscious and permits the fisherman to open it live and remove the roe.

The eggs  must be passed  through a wide screen to separate them from other fibrous matter, and then they must be delicately mixed with salt, both to preserve the eggs  and to bring out the taste. As is often the case  when preparing food, there is a delicate trade-off: The more salt,   the   better   preserved,   but   the   less   salt,   the   finer   the   taste. Preparing the caviar takes careful labor, which also increases the cost. In general, Iranians salt their caviar less than Russians, although each fishery is slightly different, and in fact each fish is different, which is why the eggs in any sized can of caviar are all from the same fish.

Of the twenty-four known varieties of sturgeon, three are still fished for caviar in the Caspian. The prices of the caviar from the three varieties—beluga, ossetra, and sevruga—are not a reflection of quality but rather of the rarity of the fish. The giant beluga are hardest to find, and therefore their caviar is the most expensive. It takes twenty years for a female beluga to mature, and at that point she can weigh as much as  1,800 pounds and be up to  twenty-six feet  in length.  Such a fish could yield twenty pounds of eggs. Beluga have the largest eggs, and these  smoky gray bubbles  are  also  the  most delicate  eggs,  which is another  reason they are  the  most  expensive.  More beluga  eggs  are broken and lost in processing than any other kind of caviar.

The dominance  of Caspian caviar  has been declining,  and it  now represents   only  about   three-quarters   of   the   world’s   supply.   With Caspian caviar growing scarcer and more expensive every year, there have been attempts to bring back European and American caviar, partly through farmed sturgeon, yielding such scrupulously labeled products as the “American Paddlefish caviar.”

BUTARGHE

Take the eggs  from a fresh mullet, best when in season, and take care not to break the delicate skin surrounding each  egg  and add a discreet amount of salt to the eggs—neither too much nor too little—and leave this way for a day and a night. Then place it in smoke far enough from a flame so that it does not feel the heat. When it has dried then place it in  a wooden box or barrel surrounded in wheat bran. This bottarga is typically eaten uncooked. But those who want it cooked can heat it under ashes  or in a clean, warm oven, turning it, but just until  it is hot.—Martino, Libro de arte coquinaria (Book of the art of cooking), 1450

LITTLE IS   KNOWN of Martino,  including  his  full  name. He was  born in Como, worked for aristocrats, and was one of the most respected and influential Italian cooks of his day. His bottarga recipe calls for mullet eggs and is smoked rather than pressed. Bottarga, which the eighteenth-century Panciroli had listed with caviar as a possible descendant of garum, varies with the fishery. Native Americans used to  make it by pressing  and drying  sturgeon eggs.  Today, it is usually salted, pressed, and dried fish eggs. In Tunisia, bottarga is made from mullet eggs  and is  a product associated  with the  Jews of Tunis, the same way smoked salmon and pastrami are associated with Jews in North American cites. But the name is thought to come from the Arab bitârikh, and it  was also  made in ancient  Egypt,  probably also  from mullet.

Today in Italy, bottarga has come to be thought of as a Sicilian food, specifically from western Sicily, and that means tuna, not mullet, eggs.

The tuna trade on the west coast of Sicily combines one of the oldest saltworks in Europe and one of the oldest tuna fisheries. Between the two, the  port city of Trapani  juts  out on the  triangular  tip of  a narrow peninsula. Typical of Sicilian towns, Trapani has a Phoenician-Roman- Norman-Arab-Crusader history. These elements are reflected in the architecture, the language, the food, and the customs. Everything in Sicily is built on layer after layer of history—all the people who came, conquered, built, were defeated, and left.

The Castiglione  tuna  company, just  north of Trapani,  makes more than 2,000 pounds of bottarga  every year, which Sicilians  grate  over spaghetti  with olive  oil, garlic, and chopped parsley. The eggs  come from the bluefin tuna that enter the Strait of Gibraltar once a year and swim past western Sicily to their Mediterranean spawning grounds. Each female has two huge roes weighing between six and seven pounds each.  Workers  prepare  a  brine  from  the  local  sea  salt  and wash the roes in it and then cover them in the coarse-grained salt that is a regional specialty. They then place a thirty-kilogram (sixty-six pound) weight on the  salted  roes. More weight is  added every week until, by the end of a month, sixty to seventy kilos, the weight of a middle-sized man, are pressing on the salted roes. After pressing, the roes are dried in the sun for a week.

Like the sturgeon fishermen of old, the Sicilians sell off the fish and eat the eggs. But they also sell the bottarga all over Sicily. They sell the tuna hearts as far away as Palermo, the Sicilian capital. Lattume, the delicate-tasting salted male reproductive gland, is for locals in the Trapani region, as are tuna intestines, stomach, and esophagus.

For centuries, this coast was famous for its salted tuna as well. But these days Sicilians don’t eat their bluefin tuna in any form; they sell it fresh for dazzlingly high prices. Ninety percent of the local catch is landed  one  hour  after  being  killed  and instantly  sold  and  flown  to Japan.

The passage  of the bluefin off the Mediterranean coast at spawning time was first observed by the Phoenicians, who set up what is called in   Sicilian tonnaras.  As  various  cultures  became  dominant  in  this passage  between Sicily and Tunisia, the  tonnara  became  layered  in ritual. Today it only  continues in two places in Sicily, the little waterfront

town of Bonagia  just north of Trapani  and the  small nearby island  of Favignana. The tonnara in Bonagia is owned by the Castiglione company, which usually, despite the high prices from Japan, loses money on it.  The bulk  of its  profit  comes  from yellowfin  tuna  caught elsewhere  and bought and packaged  by the  company. The bluefin is vanishing not because  of the tonnara but due to far more efficient fisheries in the Atlantic. Eugenio Giacomazzi, the Castiglione production manager, said that 1,000 pounds of bluefin is now considered a good catch. That used to be three or four fish, one fish according  to  ancient  accounts,  but  today it  is  a netful,  because  fish species, as they become scarce, mature younger and become smaller animals.

Castiglione  has 150 employees. But every March another 120 are hired to work the tonnara. The leader is known by the Arab word Raiz, and the fishermen sing an Arab song, “Cialome” (pronounced SHALOMAY), to invoke the gods for the hunt. But the final kill goes by the Spanish word matanza, which, appropriately, means “slaughter.”

The tuna hunt begins in March with men on the narrow waterfront of Bonagia  repairing  and arranging  nets  as they sing  traditional songs, part in Sicilian and part in Arab. Instead of exhausting  the  fish on the end of a line, in the Sicilian tonnara the bluefin is worn out by being led through a series  of nets  over  a number  of days. A net  wall 150 feet high, four and a half miles long, is anchored to the ocean floor running east  to  west.  In  May and June, the  tuna  enter  the  Mediterranean.

Approaching  the  coast  of Sicily,  they turn south to  pass  through the straits between Sicily and Tunisia but instead hit the net wall and run along it into what is called  “the island,”  which is a series of net rooms.

In ancient times, the large fish were guided through the rooms by men with long sticks. Today, this is done by a scuba diver known as the big bastard. The bastard  of Bonagia, Maurici  Guiseppe, said  that as he swims  with the  ill-fated  fish,  he passes  amphorae  and other  ancient artifacts  of  shipwrecks  from  the  Phoenicians,  the  Greeks,  and the Romans.

The big bastard’s job is to coax the tuna from one room to another—each of the rooms has a name—until, after about two weeks, the fish are  exhausted,  awaiting  their  fate  in  the camera    di matanza,  the slaughter room. The net is hauled up, and fifty-five fishermen in a long boat spear and gaff fish. It is an ancient way of fishing tuna. Twenty-five hundred years ago, in The Persians, Aeschylus, describing the Greek destruction of the Persian Navy, said it was like slaughtering tuna. The large bluefin, even though tired out from the weeks of manipulation, thrash  and struggle.  The Mediterranean  turns  black  with  their  blood, and the  foam  of the  water  turns  scarlet as  they are  stabbed, gaffed, landed, and shipped to Japan.

The tonnara fishermen spend March repairing the nets, April setting them up on the ocean floor, May or June fishing, then taking the nets back up. Then it is July, time to work the salt harvest.

SOUTH OF TRAPANI along the coast, earthen dikes begin to appear, and a few stone windmills. The dikes mark  off ponds, some of which hold turquoise  water,  some pink. The stone  towers  of windmills  stick  out from these orderly pastel ponds. The salt-works are built out along the coast until, toward the south, deep green leafy fields take over, which are  the  vineyards  of  Marsala  wine.  This  is  one  of  the  oldest  salt- making sites in the world—the one started by the Phoenicians to cure their tuna catch, and after the destruction of Carthage, continued by the Romans. When the  Muslims  were  in  Sicily  from  800 to  1000, they wrote of the windmills of Trapani.

The  current  windmills  are  based  on a  Turkish  model  that  was adopted by the Spanish, who brought their windmills to Sicily and later to  Holland. About the  year 1500, windmills were  built here  by a man named Grignani to move brine through the ponds. His son was named Ettore, which is the name of these saltworks facing the isle of Mozia. Until the  saltworks  on Mozia  were  destroyed  by the  Romans in 397 B.C., the Carthaginians had made salt there as well.

Trapani  salt was sent to the Hanseatic League  in Bergen and was known throughout  medieval  Europe.  But  the  unification of Italy in the nineteenth century made it difficult for Sicily to market its salt. The Italian government had a salt monopoly, and it protected its saltworks in Apulia by not allowing Sicilian salt onto the mainland. The monopoly was resented because  it made salt expensive. In his 1891 book, The Art   of   Eating   Well, Pellegrino  Artusi,  the  Florentine  silk  merchant turned popular food writer, suggested for his ice cream recipes:

To save  money, the  salt can be recovered  from the  ice  water used to freeze the ice cream, by evaporating the water over a fire.

For centuries an important export, Trapani salt became a local product, used to cure the tuna catch, lavishly sprinkled on grilled fish in the  Trapani  area, and to  preserve  the  caper harvest. Capers are  the buds of Capparis spinosa, so spiny, in fact, that the Turks call it cat’s claw.  They grow wild  in the  Roman forum but  are  so tough that  they also grow between cracks in the rocks in Israel’s Judean desert. They seem to love rocks and grow along the coastline boulders of southern Italy and Sicily, brightening them with purple and white flowers. But the buds must be picked before they begin to open, which requires a daily harvest in the summer and a careful examination of each bud. Then the buds must be cured to bring out the characteristic flavor. The French consider their best capers, which come from Provence, to be the smallest, and they pickle them in vinegar.

In past centuries, when Mediterranean products were difficult to get in northern Europe, nasturtium buds were  used as a substitute, as in this English recipe.

Nasturtium    Indicum. Gather  the  buds  before  they  open  to flower:  lay them  in the  shade  three  or four hours,  and putting them into an earthen glazed vessel, pour good vinegar on them, and cover it with a board. Thus letting  it stand  for eight or ten days: then being  taken out, and gently press’d, cast them into fresh vinegar, and let them so remain as long as before. Repeat this third time, and barrel them up with vinegar and a little salt.

—John Evelyn, Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets, 1699

In Sicily,  the  prized  capers  are  large  and come from the  island  of Pantelleria, which is part of Sicily, though closer to Tunisia, or the  tiny Sicilian islands off the north coast. Sicilian capers are kept in coarse Trapani  salt, often without vinegar, soaked before  using, and served with grilled fish.

Confined to their island market by the Italian monopoly, Sicilian traditions—tuna, capers, table salt, the island’s ample olive production, cheeses,  and sausages—were  not  enough to  sustain  the  saltworks, and most were abandoned by the 1970s.

But not the  saltworks  of Antonio  d’Ali, who had kept his  alive  at a third of capacity for years. “We kept going because  we always hoped that the monopoly would be dropped someday,” he said. In 1973, the Italian government ended the salt monopoly, and today these saltworks provide salt throughout Italy, which was what the Italian government had feared in the first place.

COMPETING WITH TRAPANI for longevity are the saltworks the Phoenicians started at Sfax, across the Sicilian straits in Tunisia. Today, Sfax is an unglamorous industrial town with three- and four-story buildings and a few  palm-lined  boulevards.  It  is  Tunisia’s  second  largest  port  after Tunis but the leading port for phosphates, olive oil, and salt.

The saltworks are  located  along  the  coast south of the  port. In late winter, when the salt crystals are being scraped up and harvested, the area  is  fragrant  with  the  white  blossoms  of  nearby  almond  groves. Small  vegetable  gardens  are  fenced  off  with  rows  of  prickly  pear cactus, which the Spanish brought from America and are now part of the North African landscape. As with most everything in Sfax, a visible layer of brown dust dulls the skins of the cactus and the vegetables. It is the encroaching sand of the Sahara. The dusty vegetables include cauliflower, carrots, and cucumbers, which are put up in salt brine.

Built  out  into  the  sea  are  3,000 acres  of evaporation  ponds and another 400 acres reserved for the final crystalization, which produces

300,000 metric tons of salt per year. Noureddine Guermazi, the plant director, was asked if salt was a major part of the Tunisian economy. He answered with an ironic smile, “In tonnage, yes.” Most surviving saltworks in the modern world make a profit on producing huge quantities of salt and transporting it relatively inexpensively.

Sfax is a good salt location because  it has only eight inches of rain per  year,  which makes it  much drier than Tunis  and the  north coast. Europe and eastern North America have more than forty inches of rain in a dry year. To the south is the Sahara, where there are still sebkhas. Sometimes the dry salt beds are harvested with bulldozers. Farther south into Africa, there are places where camels are still used. Taoudenni,  in northern Mali  near  both the Algerian and Mauretanian border, was first described to Europeans in 1828 by René Caillié on his geographic study of the Sahara. He found Taghaza, the city of salt, already  abandoned.  But  in  Taoudenni,  he  reported  that  rock  salt, relatively  pure   sodium  chloride,  was  found   a  few  feet  below  the surface.   Today  the   same   mine,   using   the   same   techniques,   is controlled by Moors, tall people clad in sky-blue robes, part Arab and part Berber seminomads from Mauritania. The Moors pay Malians about two dollars a month to dig thick blocks out of the salt crust and pack them  onto  camels  that travel south in caravans  of  thirty or  forty camels to Timbuktu, still a trading center on the Niger River.

Farther east, due south of Tunisia, the gray sands of Bilma, Niger, are   pockmarked   by  random  deep  pits.  The  pits   are   deep  from centuries of digging, but more salt is always there. A single family continues digging a hole for generations. Today, the salt is sold for about fifty cents for a thirty-pound block to traders who carry the blocks by caravan—with as many as 100 loaded camels—for more than two months across Niger to northern Nigeria, where Bilma salt is valued for livestock. There the fifty-cent blocks sell for about three dollars. Were the  labor  not  so  cheap,  no profit  at  all  could  be  made  from  such Saharan salt.

But the  sea  salt at Sfax is  loaded  onto  ships  and sold  all over the world. A great deal of it goes to that still salt-hungry corner of Europe, Scandinavia, for salting  fish and for deicing  roads. The fact that salt lowers  the  freezing  temperature  of water  has given salt  producers  a huge winter market on northern highways, and this has become a far more important use of salt than fisheries. The salt fish trade has undergone a historic 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.

In Sfax for Aïd Essaghir, a Muslim holiday after the fast of Ramadan ends,  salted  fish  is  poached  and  served  with  a  sauce   known as charmula. Wealthy people sometimes use salt cod, which is imported from  northern  Europe  and increasingly  expensive  even though  it  is often cured with salt shipped from Sfax. But most in Sfax salt their own local fish. The saltworks in Sfax sells noticeably more salt to the local market at Aïd Essaghir than at any other time of year.

Charmula is one of numerous Tunisian examples of salt and sweet being used together. But Tunisians say that all these salt-and-sweet dishes  are  foreign  imports  brought  from Spain  in 1492 by expelled Muslims.

The  Affes  family,  which  owns  one  of  the  two  largest  couscous factories in the world—the other is in Marseilles—is from Sfax. Here is Latifa Affes’s recipe for charmula:

Salt any large fish. Poach it and serve with the following sauce:

1 kilo red  onion,  1 kilo raisins,  ½ liter  olive  oil, salt,  black  pepper  (some use coriander powder but I do not).

Mince  onions  and cook them  slowly in olive  oil for about  two hours. Soften raisins in water and pass through a sieve to remove seeds. Add to olive oil mixture and cook on low heat for two days. Add salt and pepper.

Acres of rock-reinforced dikes mark off the salt ponds at Sfax, which host leggy birds—white egrets and pink flamingos growing pinker as they feed on the brine shrimp, their color reflecting in the milky saltwater. They graze there in the winter, and then, as though following the salt harvest, they fly to the swampy estuary of the Rhône in southern France  and graze  in the  salt ponds at Aigues-Mortes. The flamingos live better than they did when they had to visit Roman saltworks.

Pluck  the  flamingo, wash it, truss  it, put it in  a pot; add water, salt, dill, and a bit of vinegar. When it is half cooked, tie together a bouquet of leeks and coriander and cook. When it is almost cooked add defrutem for color. In a mortar put pepper, cumin, coriander, silphium root [a rare plant from Libya much loved and consequently  pushed to  extinction  by the  Romans],  mint,  and rue;  grind,  moisten  with  vinegar,  add  dates,  and  pour  on cooking broth. Empty into the same pot and thicken with starch. Pour the sauce over them and serve.—Apicius, first century A.D.

Today, Sfax and Aigues-Mortes and many other saltworks are protected bird sanctuaries. Also, today’s chefs disapprove of sauces thickened with starch. The Romans had felt differently. They particularly liked eating flamingo tongue, which led Martial, a contemporary of Apicius, to write of the birds:

My pink feathers give me my name,

Butmytongue among gourmets gives me my fame.

Aside  from the same  flamingos,  the saltworks  at Sfax and Aigues­ Mortes  have  something   else  in  common:   Both  were  bought  in  the 1990s by the Morton Salt Company.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Big Salt, Little Salt

TRANSPORTATION WAS ALWAYS the key to the salt business, and Morton was a company founded on a transportation idea. In 1880, Joy Morton, a twenty-four-year-old  Detroit-born former railroad employee, began working for a small Chicago company, E. I. Wheeler and Company.

The company had been started in 1848 by Onondaga  salt companies to serve as an agent, selling their salt in the Midwest. Morton, whose father,  J. Sterling  Morton,  would  later  become Grover  Cleveland’s secretary of agriculture, came to the Chicago company with a small amount of money to invest and an idea. Staking his entire savings, $10,000, young Morton bought into the company and acquired a fleet of  lake  boats.  During  the  summer  when the  Great  Lakes were completely open and ice-free, his barges could inexpensively deliver a year’s  supply  of  salt  to  midwestern  centers.  At  a time  when salt companies  were  fighting  for  the   expanding  midwestern  market, Morton’s  company,  with its  Great  Lakes barges,  had an important competitive advantage.

By 1910,  when the  company incorporated,  it   had purchased saltworks, and the Morton Salt Company was now both a distributor and a producer. One of its early innovations, in 1911, was the addition of magnesium carbonate to table salt, which kept the salt crystals from sticking  together;  as stated  on the  box, the  salt  “never  cakes or hardens.”   Eventually,   the   chemical   was  replaced   with   another nonsticking agent,  calcium  silicate.  This  nonsticking  quality was to become  the basis of Morton’s famous marketing campaign. Another innovation: In 1924, on the recommendation of the Michigan Medical Association, Morton produced the first iodized salt.

In those years, when the vacuum evaporator was still a new idea and a fascination surrounded the concept of uniform salt crystals, Morton claimed that every crystal it produced was of the exact same size and shape. “The final product is of such uniform, high quality and grain that inspection under a microscope  cannot reveal a difference between Morton salt made in New York and Morton salt made in California,” the company asserted. Morton bought saltworks all over the country. Some evaporated seawater, others heated brine, and still others mined rock salt, and yet a single  consistent product was made that customers identified simply as “Morton’s salt.”

The company created a cylindrical package  and even patented the little metal pouring spout and hired an advertising firm, N. W. Ayer, to launch the first nationwide advertising campaign ever undertaken for salt.   Morton   commissioned   twelve   advertisements   to   run   in consecutive issues of Good  Housekeeping magazine. But rather than taking the  twelve,  the company seized  on one of the  ad agency’s backup ideas, a little girl in the rain holding an umbrella and spilling salt. The original slogan was “Runs freely,” but then someone suggested “It never rains but it pours,” which was deemed too negative and was replaced with “When it rains  it pours.” The ad, which first appeared in 1914, not surprisingly does not mention magnesium carbonate but instead claims that the reason it pours so well is “it’s all salt—perfect  cube crystals.  Note  the  handy can with  adjustable aluminum spout.” In the 1940s, a poll of 4,000 housewives showed 90 percent recognized the Morton brand.

FromThe Ladies’ Home Journal, October 1919.

As it became clear that quantity and transport were the keys to profit in a modern salt industry, small producers began disappearing, and companies such as Morton began buying them out to become  bigger. In the nineteenth century, more than a dozen salt companies operated in the southern end of San Francisco Bay. During the twentieth century, these companies were consolidated by the Leslie Salt Company. In

1978, Cargill bought Leslie, and today there are only two companies involved in San Francisco Bay salt, Cargill and Morton. Cargill, a food company that is the largest private company in the United States, is the only salt producer left in San Francisco Bay. Morton buys some of this salt for distribution. Both companies have been buying other salt

companies for decades, and they have become  the two largest salt-producing companies in the world. It was Morton’s 1996 acquisition of Salins du Midi, owners of the Aigues-Mortes saltworks, producers of France’s  leading  brand,  La Baleine,  that made Morton the  world’s largest salt company.

IN  1955,  MORTON bought the saltworks on Great Inagua Island  in the Bahamas, then a British colony. Most of the few people who arrive on this island bump down in a small plane. The single-runway airport is a lonely, windswept place with two U.S. Coast Guard helicopters that work with the Bahamians looking for small planes from South America carrying white powder that is not salt. A few people cluster around the two-room terminal building because  it has a television. A woman cuts hair in the other room. A sign by the runway says, “Inagua, the best kept secret in the Bahamas.”

The sea is a blue-green that is almost blinding in its brightness. The streets  are  paved and empty except  for  dogs and chickens.  The occasional traffic is almost always a pickup  truck that says “Morton Salt” on the side. Matthew Town, the capital and only real town, is a grid of about a dozen intersecting streets with little green-trimmed, or yellow,  or sometimes  hot-pink  houses interspersed  with overgrown empty lots. Twelve hundred people live in this town and a few hundred on the rest of the island. The general store, well stocked with frozen foods, the leading  hotel—a  two-story house with a turquoise-green picket fence—the drinking water, the electricity, and most everything else on the island comes  from Morton Salt. Morton has 200 employees at the salt-works, but many more in Matthew Town.

Great Inagua is a flat limestone-and-coral island. The soil is impregnated  with salt from the sea, which leaches into the inland ponds. In addition, the island is favorable for making sea salt because it is sheltered by the large Caribbean islands of Hispaniola, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, and so rarely is hit full force by a hurricane.

The leaching  soil  turns  the  water  in an inland  lake  saltier than seawater.  Seawater  is  pumped  into reservoirs  in the  inland  lake, where it remains, sheltered from tides, for nine months, concentrating from solar evaporation, while attracting more salt from the soil. Then it is pumped  to a crystalizing pond for twelve  more  months  until it is reduced to a three-inch layer of salt crystals.

In the wetlands surrounding the inland lake live 50,000 to 60,000 flamingos,  feeding  off  the  brine  shrimp  in  the  38,000  acres  of evaporation ponds. Believing that the shrimp aid evaporation, Morton buys additional brine shrimp eggs from the ponds  in San Francisco Bay.

Morton produces  no table  salt  in Great  Inagua, only crude  road deicing salt, an industrial grade for water softeners, a quality product for the  chemical  industry,  and a fishery salt  that is  bought by cod fishermen in Iceland. Almost none of Great Inagua’s salt stays in the Bahamas. Bahamians  buy their water  softeners,  often made from Great Inagua salt, from Florida. For Morton, Great Inagua has the sea salt production closest to the United States’ east coast and produces 1 million tons of salt per year. “You have to drive production,” said

Geron Turnquest,  vice  president  of operations  at  the Great  Inagua Morton saltworks. “It is volume that makes  the profit here.”

MOST SALTWORKS I N the Caribbean either have been taken over  by large  international  companies  or  have been abandoned. In  the nineteenth  century,  the  Turks  Island  Company was an important international company. It even owned a saltworks on San Francisco Bay. But in 1927, that saltworks was absorbed into the larger American company that became  Leslie, which was bought by Cargill. The salt companies of the Turks were not big enough to compete.

A few miles south of Grand Turk Island, Salt Cay is a two-and-a-half- by-two-mile triangle with a sizable part of its interior occupied by abandoned salt ponds, crumbling rock coral dikes, brine still reddish with brine algae, abandoned metal windmills sticking out over the reddish  water  like  homemade scarecrows.  The airport is  within walking distance of most of the population. Donkeys and cattle left over  from better  days wander  wild,  graze,  and breed.  The largest native animal in the arid, salty landscape is the three-foot-long giant iguana.

This island offers a chance  to see a nineteenth-century Caribbean community. Livestock wander the streets. The tin-roofed whitewashed houses, shutters painted bright colors, their foundations surrounded by a row of conch shells, date mostly from the nineteenth century. There are almost no cars; it is mainly bicycles that use the well-worn sparkly roads that are paved  with salt. In recent years, golf carts have been replacing bicycles as the leading mode of transportation. They seem well suited to the salt roads.

Under the rules of colonialism, everything goes to and comes from the mother country. In 1870, the colony of Turks and Caicos was asked to send a crest  to England  so that a flag for the colony could  be designed. A Turks and Caicos designer drew a crest that included Salt Cay saltworks with salt rakers in the foreground and piles of salt.

Back in England, it was the era of Arctic exploration, and, not knowing where the Turks and Caicos was, the English designer assumed the little white domes  were igloos. And so he drew doors on each one.

And this scene of salt piles with doors remained the official crest of the colony for almost 100 years, until replaced in 1968 by a crest featuring a flamingo.

In the nineteenth century, Salt Cay had 900 residents. In 1970, three years after the salt industry died, fewer than 400 remained. At the turn of the twenty-first century, 62 adults and 15 children were the only legal residents. Many of the 62 are retired, and the island would have a labor shortage  were  it not  in the  sea path between  the  island  of Hispaniola  and Florida. Many illegal Haitians  and Dominicans  land here, sometimes by mistake, and some find work and stay. If nothing else is available, money can always be made by taking rocks off the dikes and sea walls of the saltworks and sitting on the pile, smashing them one by one with a hammer into gravel for building material.

When the  salt  business  died,  the  remaining  merchants  still  had stockpiles of salt, often in the bottom floor of their homes. Eight- or nine-man Haitian sailboats  arrived at the Turks and Caicos  to sell mangoes  and other items. Before returning home, they would stop off at the abandoned saltworks of South Caicos, Grand Turk, or Salt Cay, where mountains of salt remained, and scoop out a load.

The last powerful hurricane to hit Salt Cay, in 1945, destroyed all but three of the great houses where wealthy salt-trading families lived with their  salt  stored  in  the  basement.  In  the  late  1990s,  one of  the remaining three salt houses collapsed from termite damage, exposing its cache of salt. This unprotected, graying, and rain-eaten iceberg is the last of Salt Cay salt, except for a small crusty pile left slowly melting from humidity in the  basement of one of the two great houses still standing.

Native Salt Cay residents are called “belongers.” Many of the belongers were salt workers, who left for merchant marine service in World War II, stayed on until their retirement, and then returned home, not seeming to realize that in the meantime everyone else had left and the island had turned into a desert.

The trees had been cut for the saltworks, and without trees there was little  rain and the earth dried out. The landscape  is  arid, with desert bushes clawing up from sandy, barren soil. Cattle and donkeys seeking the scarce shade from midday sun seem to be hiding silently behind every bush. The nights are starlit and cooled by an easterly breeze, with no sounds  but the rolling sea and the occasional rustle of a wandering cow.

Adolphus Kennedy, born in 1915, lives on Salt Cay with his wife, who is three years younger. They are alone. Their four children and many grandchildren have all left. A soft-voiced  man with a gentle manner, he recalls loading salt onto fourmasted schooners. Mostly he remembers the weight of the sacks. The pay?

“Oh, there was no pay. They paid us nothing. The big company kept all the money.”

It is easy to be romantic about the vanished Caribbean salt trade, but in truth it was similar to the history of sugarcane on other islands.

Salt was built on slavery, and many thought that abolition in 1836 would mean the  end of salt.  But  the  salt  merchants  survived  for a time because  they could still get workers for near slave wages. There was no other work.

Most  of  the  old  belongers  remember  working  for  one shilling sixpence a day, less than a dollar. “That’s right,” said Kennedy. “One shilling sixpence for a nine-hour day.” He smiled. “But not every day.

When ships  were  in and there was work. It  was slavery,”  he said, revealing no bitterness in his voice.

“Of course you could buy some food for a shilling. There was rain in those days, and they could use the land. Grew corn and beans and cucumbers.” Today, the land is too dry for such gardens. With no salt, little work, and less agriculture, the aged belongers live on government assistance. The Turks and Caicos is still a British colony.

The sluices are kept open and the ponds get seawater at high tides, so most are not evaporating. A few have evaporated into sand and salt crystal. In low tide, one of the canals that brings in seawater exposes two eighteenth-century cannons, weapons of war brought here to guard British salt from the Spanish, now rusting in the saltwater.

THE UNITED STATES is both the largest salt producer and the largest salt consumer. It produces over 40 million metric tons of salt a year, which earns more than $1 billion in sales revenue. The production leaders, behind the United States, in order of importance are China, Germany, Canada, and India. France has fallen to eighth place and the United Kingdom to ninth.

But little of this is table salt. In the United States, only 8 percent of salt production is for food. The largest single use of American salt, 51 percent, is for deicing roads.

American salt sources are many and varied. The Great Salt Lake, which is the fourth largest lake in the world without an outlet, produces salt, some by Morton. Cargill operates a rock salt mine 1,200 feet below the city of Detroit. It covers more than 1,400 underground acres and has fifty miles of roads. The mine began  with a disaster. In 1896, a

1,100-foot shaft was sunk but then became flooded  with water and natural gas killing six and losing the investors their money. But in 1907, the mine was successfully started up.

Cargill also operates the mine on Avery Island. The McIlhenny and Avery families lease the salt mine to Cargill, the oil and gas to Exxon, and they still  make the pepper  sauce themselves.  Paul  McIlhenny, president and CEO, is the great-grandson of Edmund, who had come home from New Orleans with the seeds. He inherited Edmund’s robust round features and rugged friendly eyes. “We are lucky to be in a place that not only supports agriculture but has oil, gas, and salt,” he said.

The agriculture  he referred  to  is  for  Tabasco sauce, which has developed into a successful international family-owned business. The peppers grown today on Avery Island are only used for seeds that are planted in Central America, where pepper picking is still cost effective. Not only does the picking require skill, since each pepper must be picked at its moment of optimum ripeness, but it is painful, backbreaking work. The powerful capsaicin can burn hands, or if the picker  is  careless,  the  face  and eyes. Experiments  with  machine harvesting failed, and the McIlhenny family refused to experiment with chemicals that would make all the peppers ripen simultaneously. So in the 1970s, when it started to become difficult to find people in southern Louisiana willing to pick peppers, the solution was to reverse history and take seeds from Avery Island back to Mexico and Central America

every year.

After one post–Civil War failure, salt mining began in earnest on Avery Island in 1898. Cargill took over in 1997. The current operation can mine nineteen tons of salt in a minute and a half and takes 2.5 million tons a year. Down in the mine more equipment is seen than actual miners. Bulldozers, tractors, jeeps, pickups, trucks, train carts, tracks, and other equipment are brought down piece by piece in a five- by-seven-by-ten-foot shaft elevator and assembled in the mine. Below, it  looks  like  a busy nighttime  construction  site.  A scaler,  a huge

machine that resembles a brontosaurus, steadily munches away at the white walls. When equipment is no longer useful, it is not considered cost effective to take it apart and bring it back  up, so the mine leaves a trail of abandoned  equipment, a junkyard on the side of some of the wide shafts. Salt mining has always been like that. The horses used in Wieliczka, and the mules lowered by rope underneath Detroit, never came back up either.

One of the older miners  said  that his father had worked fifty-two years under Avery Island, carrying salt blocks and loading them on mules. Today, the salt is trucked to crushers that break it into  small enough pieces for the conveyor belts to move the salt to barges that carry it along the bayou and up the Mississippi River. A barge will hold 1,500 tons of salt.

The mine is dug in rooms called benches  that are 60 feet by 100 feet  with 28-foot  ceilings.  Once a bench is  mined,  a road  is  dug through the floor down to another  level and another bench. The salt dome that is being mined is a column of solid sodium chloride, crystal clear, thought to be 40,000 feet deep—almost eight miles. The floors, the walls, the ceiling, and the uncut depths below are all between 99.25 and 99.9  percent pure.  Under  the miners’  lamps—the  first  miner’s safety lamp was invented by Humphry Davy—the benches appear to be black rooms. But a freshly cut bench, without the soot of machinery, is crystalline white, a room of pure salt crystal.

The vehicles are all four-wheel-drive, because the salt floor is as slippery as ice.  Driving  jeeps  and trucks deep in the earth is  like driving through a snow blizzard, at night. But it is darker than night. “It’s so dark it hurts your eyes,” one miner said.

The mine is currently operating at a depth of 1,600 feet, and with 38,400 feet to go, it might seem  that this salt dome is an inexhaustible resource. But as the miners dig, to withstand added stress from the weight  above them,  the  benches must be made smaller.  Another problem is that salt is a good conductor of heat. The earth gets hotter closer  to  its  center,  and as  they  dig  deeper  into  the  earth  the temperature   will rise  from the current ninety degrees. The heat will require  more  ventilation  and more  efficiency  in  machine-cooling

systems. Also, the conveyor belt  will get longer and longer. So the deeper they go, the more expensive the salt becomes, and salt must be cheap to be profitable. It is thought that the dome will offer another forty or fifty years of cost-effective mining, but that is a guess.

The salt is  used for road  deicing, industry, and pharmaceuticals.

Table salt production stopped in 1982 when the energy cost of the vacuum evaporators was judged too costly. The Chinese might think that a salt dome  full of oil and natural gas would have no problem with cheap energy, but in this case, the salt and the gas are operated by two separate companies that never arrived at the simple solution of ancient Sichuan.

In nearby New Iberia,  a town canaled  by bayous and draped  in swaying moss, Avery Island salt used to be the salt of Cajun food. Ted Legnon’s father was a salt worker on Avery Island, and he brought home blocks of salt for boudin sausages and cured meat. Now Ted is a butcher, and he still makes boudin, though he now makes  it without hog’s  blood  because the  health  department  stopped  the  local slaughtering practices. He also uses Morton’s and not local salt.

One pound  of salt is used for 250 pounds  of boudin, along  with ground pork meat, pork liver, cooked rice, onions, bell peppers, and powdered cayenne pepper. It is all stuffed in hog’s intestine and gently poached. Legnon’s Butcher Shop in New Iberia sells 300 pounds of this boudin blanc per day, except between Christmas and New Year’s, when sales rise to 500 pounds per day.

IN RECENT YEARS, scientists  and engineers  have been drawn to the ability of salt mines to preserve, because  they usually have a low and steady humidity, and if not drilled too deep, an even, cool temperature. Also, salt seals. Crystals will grow over cracks. This was how the Celtic bodies had been sealed in the mine at Hallein. It is also why soy sauce makers  formed a crust of salt on the top of the barrel, to make a perfect seal.

In March 1945, American troops passing through the German town of Merkers discovered a salt mine 1,200 feet underground. In it was 100 tons of gold bullion, twenty-nine rows of sacks of gold coins, and bails of international currency, including  2 million U.S. dollars. They also found more than 1,000 paintings, including Raphaels and Rembrandts. Among the booty were things of little value, such as the battered suitcases of people deported to concentration camps. The total value of the treasures, preserved in the perfect stable environment of a salt mine, was estimated at $3 billion 1945 dollars.

Because of the sealing ability of salt, it has also occurred to engineers that salt mines might be the safest place to bury nuclear waste. A Carlsbad, New Mexico, mine  is being prepared for plutonium-contaminated nuclear waste that will remain toxic for the next 240,000  years. Salt will close  over  fractures, but how do we warn people 100,000 years from now not to open the mine? What language can be used? Suggestions include a series of grimacing masks.

The U.S. government has also  stored  an emergency reserve  of petroleum in salt domes throughout the Gulf of Mexico area. The idea of a strategic oil reserve was first proposed in 1944. In the 1970s, it was decided to store at least 700 million barrels of oil in a select few of the 500 salt domes that have been identified in southern Louisiana and eastern Texas. But, ominous for the nuclear waste program, the domes don’t always seal. The Weeks Island salt dome, not far from Avery Island, was part of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve until signs of water leakage led to fear of flaws in the dome. The oil was pumped out and the dome abandoned.

THE OWNERS OF the Dürnberg salt mine in Hallein, Austria, which has been hosting visitors since at least 1700, decided in 1989 that salt was no longer profitable and closed down the mine. But it still earns money from 220,000 visitors each year, taking them on rides on the steep, long wooden slides that were built to transport miners.

In the nineteenth  century, when health spas became fashionable, many  of the  old  brine  springs  saw a more  lucrative alternative  to making salt. In 1855, a bath was started at Salies-de-Béarn. In 1895, a red stone pseudo-Moorish palace was built to house the baths, which, in  spite  of  continued  salt  production,  became the  town’s  leading economic activity. The baths are said to be beneficial for gynecological problems, rheumatism, and children  with growth problems. Today, only about 750 tons of salt are made in Salies-de- Béarn every year, but this is enough to ensure  that the tradition of jambon de Bayonne continues.

Nineteenth-century salt making at Salies-de-Béarn. Marcel Saule

The part-prenants are still organized and entitled to their share of the salt production, but today, rather than being paid in large buckets of brine, they are paid in money. Each of the 564 remaining part-prenants receives approximately thirty dollars per year.

The claim that millions of years ago, algae in the brine left bromides, iodine,  potassium,  and other  minerals,  is  the  basis  of  the  town business in Salsomaggiore, outside of Parma. A spa palace was built from  1913 to  1923 by architect Ugo Giusti  and decorator  Galileo Chini. It is considered the greatest example of Liberty architecture, the Italian version  of  art  nouveau. Marble columns  line  the  halls,  huge staircases  climb  to  floors  of  marble  mosaic  with wicker  furniture.

Murals in gold leaf on the theme of water fill the huge, high-ceilinged walls.

The brine at the spa is said to be especially helpful to those suffering from rheumatism, arthritis, and circulatory ailments. Each year, 50,000 people go to Salsomaggiore to sit in a deep turn-of-the-century tub in a tiled room and be cured in brine like a herring.

The town is  a collection  of 1920s and 1930s hotels  and cafes, resembling a faded, out-of-fashion Riviera resort without a beach. The well-dressed clientele  arrive in trickles, not waves. The spa business has been struggling  of  late  because the  Italian  government  has stopped covering health spas in its national health plan.

Meanwhile, the famous prosciutto di Parma are now cured with salt from Trapani. A crossbred pig has been developed that has less fat and more  weight,  and it  is  still  fed on the  whey from Parmigiano cheese. The pig produces a huge, round, meaty leg. The designated area for prosciutto  di Parma is about forty square miles, centered on the rolling, black-soiled farmland of Langhhirano, which means “lake of frogs,” originally a marsh. The popularity of these  hams has turned prosciutto  into a huge business, and the hundreds  of thousands  of hams produced every year are now cured in climatized rooms that derive no advantage from the dry winds.

FASHIONABLE   PEOPLE   ARE now divided   into  two  camps. One  is passionate  about  being  healthy and eating  less  salt,  the  other  is passionate  about  salt.  The argument has been continuing  since ancient times between those who think salt is healthy and those who think  it is  unhealthy.  They both may be right.  Unarguably,  the body needs salt. A great deal of research indicates a relationship between high blood pressure  and cardiovascular problems  and eating  large quantities of salt. The Yellow Emperors Classic of Internal Medicine, a Chinese book from the first or second  century A.D., warned that salt can cause high  blood  pressure,  which  can lead  to  strokes.  Not coincidently, one of the fatal symptoms of salt deficiency is low blood pressure. But there are also studies that refute a link between high salt intake and high blood pressure. Some studies even indicate that low-

salt  diets  are  unhealthy.  The kidneys  store  excess sodium,  and in theory someone with healthy  kidneys  could eat  excessive  salt  with impunity. Sweating and urination, by design, relieve the body of salt excesses. The problem lies in the balance of sodium and potassium. But it seems that an imbalance cannot be adjusted simply by eating more or less potassium-rich vegetables versus sodium-rich salt.

The theoretical debate continues, but clinical evidence shows that people  who consume large  quantities  of salt are  not as healthy as those who don’t.

Meanwhile, fashionable chefs are cooking with more salt—or more noticeable salt. It has become  stylish to serve food on a bed of salt, cook it in a crust of salt, make it crunchy  with lots  of large crystals. More than 1,000 years ago, the Chinese were cooking in a salt crust. Chicken cooked in a crust of salt is an ancient recipe attributed to the Cantonese, though it may have  originated  with a south China mountain people known as the Hakka. Today, fish is cooked  this way in Italy, France, Spain, and many other places. Even a fish farmer with a small restaurant by the Dead Sea in Israel cooks his fish in a salt crust. The salt seals, in the same way that cooking in clay does, but it does not make the fish or chicken salty. French chefs sometimes leave the fish unscaled to avoid salting the flesh.

In the old Guérande salt port of Le Croisic, in a 1615 thick-beamed, stone  waterfront building  where  merchants  used to buy salt for the moored ships, is a restaurant called Le Bretagne. It is one of many restaurants in the Guérande area that specializes in sea bass baked in a salt crust. It is evident from the quantity of salt used that this is a style  of  cooking  either  for the  very  rich or  for a modern  age of inexpensive salt.

BAR EN CROUTE DE SEL (SEA BASS IN SALT CRUST)

Choose a sea bass of about two pounds for two people. Five to seven pounds of sel de Guérande [gray salt from Guérande] Five black peppercorns, thyme, rosemary, tarragon, and fennel Clean the fish. Do not scale it.

Fill the stomach with the herbs and a few turns of a pepper mill.

Place the fish on a bed of coarse salt in an ovenware dish. Cover the fish with a layer of salt slightly less than an inch thick. Pat it down and moisten  it with a spray humidifier.

Bake it in the oven and decorate with seaweed.—Michèle and  Pierre  Coïc, Le Bretagne, Le Croisic

AFTER THOUSANDS OF years of struggle to make salt white and of even grain, affluent people will now pay more for salts that are odd shapes and colors. In the late eighteenth century, British captain James Cook reported  that the Hawaiians made excellent salt. However, he complained that on the island of Atooi, today known as Kauai, the salt was brown and dirty. The cause of this was a tradition of mixing the salt with a local volcanic red clay, alaea, which is brick red from a high iron content. Cook did not seem to understand that this “dirty salt” was not intended  to be table salt. The salt was made for ritual blessings and religious feasts. It was also used to preserve  marlin and as a medicine,  especially  for  purification  during  periods  of  fasting.  But today this dirty salt, “alaea red salt,” is widely available, sought after by fine chefs and would be gourmets.

Gray salts, black salts, salts with any visible impurities are sought out and marketed for their colors, even though the tint usually means the presence of dirt. Like the peasants in Sichuan, many consumers distrust modern factory salt. They would rather have a little mud than iodine, magnesium carbonate, calcium silicate, or other additives, some of which are merely imagined. The New Cheshire Salt Works, which does not add iodine, adds sodium hexacyanoferrate II as an anticaking  agent.  There  is  no evidence  that  such chemicals  are harmful, and, in the case of iodine, a great deal of evidence that it is healthy.  Now there  is  talk  of  adding  flouride  to  salt  for  its  health benefits. But modern people have seen too many chemicals and are ready to go back to eating dirt.

Then, too, 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.

Among  the big winners  in this new salt fashion are  the old-time producers  from  the  Bay of  Bourgneuf.  These were  the  salts  that Colbert had complained could be so much more sellable if only the producers  would  learn  to  make them  whiter.  Their  impurities  had always been a drawback. As recently as 1911, the French pharmacist Francis Marre, warned in his book Défendez votre estomac contre les fraudes alimentaires, “In general the first thing to do [when buying salt] is to make sure it is white, this would give you the best assurance that it is a pure product.” The problem with the Bay of Bourgneuf salt was the dark umber clay at the bottom of the ponds. Particles got caught in the  square  sodium  chloride  crystals.  But  once again,  Colbert  was wrong. Today’s  consumers  will pay high prices  for the gray salt of Guérande, Noirmoutier, or Ile de Ré.

Many French traditions vanished in the 1980s, including kigsall, the salted pork of Guérande. In Noirmoutier, the salt business almost died between 1986 and 1994, with only twenty-one  salt makers left. In 1995, a group of locals and off-islanders formed a salt cooperative to bring back traditional salt making, and now almost 160 work on the island’s salt ponds and market their salt through the cooperative. Guérande, Noirmoutier, and Ile de Ré have all attracted French people longing to return to agriculture. One-third of the salt makers on Noirmoutier are younger than thirty-five.

The paludiers of Guérande used to be locals in that part of Brittany who passed  on the work from father to son. But today only 20 percent of the 300 paludiers are local. After two generations of French leaving their villages and their agricultural way of life and moving to the cities, there is a significant minority doing the reverse. They leave Paris to raise ducks in Périgord or oysters on the Atlantic. And some come to Brittany to rake salt in a way that is so traditional that fiberglass poles and rubber tires for wheelbarrows are the only discernible changes  in technology since before the Revolution.

Unlike with the big companies, here the future is quality, not quantity. They command high prices for their salt because it is a product that is handmade  and traditional in a world increasingly hungry for a sense of artisans. They make two kinds of salt, the gray salt and fleur de sel. The light, brittle fleur de sel crystals are ten times more expensive than costly gray salt. French salt makers do battle in court over what is true fleur de sel. Guérande has sued Aigues-Mortes—all the more suspect since it was bought by “the Americans”—over its use of the term.

But fleur de sel is not unique  to Brittany, and may be as old as making sea salt. In the second  century B.C., Cato gave instructions for making fleur de sel in De agricultura:

Fill a broken-necked amphora with clean water, place in the sun. Suspend in it a strainer of ordinary salt. Agitate and refill repeatedly; do this several times a day until salt remains two

days undissolved. A test: drop in a dried anchovy or an egg. If it floats, the brine is suitable for steeping meat, cheese or fish for salting. Put out this brine in pans or baking dishes in the sun, and leave in the sun until crystallized. This gives you “flower of salt.” When the sky is cloudy, and at night, put indoors; put in the sun daily when the sun shines.

Skimming the ponds at Guérande for fleur de sel as the sun sets, paludiers  can look up and see the silhouette  of the Moorish stone steeple of Saint-Guénolé in Batz-sur-Mer across the grassy wetlands. Near the church is the distinct smell of butter and a long line of people in front of the bakery, Biscuits Saint-Guénolé. The bakery was started in the  1920s  with the  recipes  of a woman who sold  cakes in the neighborhood. Breton baking is about salt and butter. Although modern refrigeration has made unsalted butter easily available, Bretons insist that salt brings out the flavor of butter.

Kouing amann, the name of one of the most famous cakes of the region, is Celtic for “piece of butter.” Gérard Jadeau, who runs the shop, says that in his kouing amann, butter makes up half of the total ingredients. It is a buttery dough, layered like puff pastry, rolled flat. Butter is spread on it. Then  it is rolled and sliced, and the slices are arranged in a baking dish and put in the oven.

It  is  not easy to  get  this  much  butter in a cake. The trick  is  a moderate oven. Too hot, and the butter will separate; too cool, and the butter will keep the dough from baking. But even with this quantity of butter, Breton bakers will say that what gives the cake its buttery flavor is the saltiness.

Jadeau, between ovens, wrote down on the back of his business card the following recipe for his popular butter cookies:

55 kg flour

30 kg sugar

GALETTE FINE

20 kg butter

8 kg eggs

1k 200 salt

Mix the dough, let it rest a half an hour, fashion it into cookies and bake.

“The trick,” he said teasingly, “is always mixing in the right order.” But he refused to say what the correct order was. Clearly, the flour is last, because in baking, flour is always the last ingredient. The butter is probably mixed with the salt first. Jadeau salts his own butter with salt from the same Batz-sur-Mer producer of Guérande salt that his shop has been using since 1920.

Does he use the gray salt?

“No.”

Fleur de sel?

“No, that’s too expensive.”

He gets a Batz producer to wash the gray salt until it is white and then crush it fine. “I don’t think the gray salt is clean,” he said. “It has dirt in it. This salt I use you could get anywhere. But I am here so I get it here.”

In the past, this kind of fine, white salt was called in Celtic holen gwenn, white salt, and was rare and expensive, only for the best tables and the finest salted foods. The gray was the cheap everyday salt. The relative  value  of  the  white  and gray salt  is  a question  of  supply, demand, and labor, but also culture, history, and the fashion of the times.

Why should salt that is washed be cheaper than salt with dirt?

Fixing the true value of salt, one of earth’s most accessible commodities, has never been easy.

Care has been taken to omit references to animal and fish slaughter though history is history and salts impact as the most universal preserver will be stated in the following as a factual element and not a recomendation for consumption in conjunction with flesh, simply historical fact, so apologies to the more sensitive vegans among us.

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