Salt

by Mark Kurlansky

  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 constantly, 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 surv
ived 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.