Salt

by Mark Kurlansky

  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 game. 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 Sax
on 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 available 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.