Salt

by Mark Kurlansky

  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 sie
ve 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,

  But my tongue 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.

  From The 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 Inag
ua, 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 IN 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.