Salt

by Mark Kurlansky

  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

  A diagram showing how to make choucroute from the 1938 edition of Larousse Gastronomique by Prosper Montagné.

  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 Medite
rranean 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 MEDI
TERRANEAN 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.