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.
The canals of downtown Syracuse, New York. Onondaga Historical Association, Syracuse
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 ab
out 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, t
he 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.
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