Salt: A World History

by Mark Kurlansky

Giovanni Boccaccio, the fourteenth-century Florentine father of Italian prose, mentions it in The Decameron. In the fifteenth century, Platina called it the leading cheese of Italy. Samuel Pepys, the seventeenth-century English diarist, claimed to have saved his from the London fire by burying it in the backyard. Thomas Jefferson had it shipped to him in Virginia.

The one thing the Parma dairies produced very little of was and still is milk. Just as the Egyptians millennia before had learned that it was more profitable to make salt fish than sell salt, the people of the Po determined that selling dairy products was far more profitable than selling milk.

At this point the milk had curdled, leaving an almost clear, protein-rich liquid, and this whey was fed to pigs. It became a requirement of prosciutto di Parma that it be made from pigs that had been fed the whey from Parmesan cheese.

(The word salami is derived from the Latin verb to salt.)

By tradition ricotta was made on Thursday so that the cheese would be ready for Sunday’s traditional tortelli d’erbette. Erbette literally means “grass,” but in Parma it is also the name of a local green similar to Swiss chard.

Tortelli d’erbette is a ravioli-like pasta stuffed with ricotta, Parmigiano cheese, erbette, salt, and two spices that were a passion in the thirteenth century and highly profitable cargo for the ships of both Venice and Genoa: black pepper and nutmeg.

In the Parma area, butter was a privilege of the cheese masters—theirs to distribute or sell, generally at high prices.

Stuffed pasta in butter sauce worked particular well in this region where the local wheat was soft, different from the rest of Italy, and produced a pasta that, when mixed with eggs, was rich and supple when fresh, but brittle and unworkable when dried. Dried pasta, like olive oil, belonged to the rest of Italy.

The Latin word for a wooden cheese mold, forma, is the root of the Italian word for cheese, formaggio.

The aging of cheese is a matter of its slow absorption of salt. It takes two years for the salt to reach the center of a wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.

Unlike in Africa or ancient Rome, no single salt route was established. Each caravan had to devise a route based on arrangements with the feudal lords along the way.

In exchange for the salt, the Po Valley traded its salt products: salami, prosciutto, and cheese. It also traded its famous soft wheat for salt.

In the eighteenth century, when the Bourbons ruled Parma, they traded their French luxury items for salt, but they also exchanged galley slaves for salt with Genoa, which needed galley slaves for its expanding trade empire.

In Parma, a ten-year prison sentence could be reduced to five years as a galley slave on a Genoese ship. But most of these slaves lived only two years, whi...

IN THE FIFTH century B.C., before Genoa was Roman, it was the thriving port of a local people called the Ligurians. It was taken by Rome, by Carthage, by Rome again, by Germanic tribes, by Muslims. Finally, in the twelfth century it became, like Venice, an independent city-state dedicated to commerce.

Genoa’s success in Hyères led to the decline of Pisa’s Sardinian salt trade. Genoese salt merchants then moved into Sardinia, developed the saltworks of Cagliari, again building a system of evaporation ponds, and made Sardinia one of the largest salt producers in the Mediterranean.

In 886, a man about whom little is known except possibly his appearance, Wilfredo the Hairy

Soft and soluble, rock salt is easy to carve and even easier to polish.

The first written record of salt in Cardona is from the Romans, who usually favored sea salt but considered Cardona’s rock salt to be of high quality.

Cardona was known in medieval Catalonia as an ideal source of salt for making hams and sausages. From the capital, the port of Barcelona, Cardona salt was exported to Europe and became one of the leading rock salts in the Middle Ages.

AFTER 1250, GENOA went even farther into the Mediterranean, buying salt in the Black Sea, North Africa, Cyprus, Crete, and Ibiza—many of the same saltworks that Venice was trying to dominate.

Salt was the engine of Genoese trade. With the salt the Genoese bought, they made salami, which was sold in southern Italy for raw silk, which was sold in Lucca for fabrics, which were sold to the silk center of Lyon.

The Genoese were pioneers in maritime insurance, banking, and the use of huge Atlantic-sized ships, which they bought or leased from the Basques, in Mediterranean trade. These ships, with their vast cargo holds, had room for salt on a return voyage.

Venice was winning the competition because of a more cohesive political organization and because of its system of salt subsidies. When this salt competition led to a war in 1378–80, known as the War of Chioggia, Venice’s ability to convert its commercial fleet into warships proved decisive.

The beginning of the end came in 1488 when the Portuguese captain Bartolomeu Dias rounded Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. In 1492, Columbus, in search of another route to India in the opposite direction, began a series of voyages for Spain, which opened up trans-Atlantic trade carrying new and valuable spices. Then in 1497, Caboto, the Genoese turned Venetian, sailed for England as John Cabot, again looking for a route to India, and told the world about North America and its wealth of codfish.

Not only were Atlantic ports now needed for trade with the newly found lands, but the Portuguese had opened the way from Atlantic ports to the Indian Ocean and the spice producers.

Genoa succumbed to the new reality, and during Spain’s golden age, the Genoese served as the leading bankers and financiers of that expanding Atlantic power.

BY THE SEVENTH century A.D., all of western Europe spoke Indo-European languages—languages that stemmed from the Bronze Age Asian invasion of Europe—except for the Basques. In their small mountainous land on the Atlantic coast, partly in what was to become Spain and partly in the future France, Basque culture, language, and laws had survived all the great invasions, including those of the Celts and the Romans.

The medieval Catholic Church forbade the eating of meat on religious days, and, in the seventh century, the number of these days was dramatically expanded. The Lenten fast, a custom started in the fourth century, was increased to forty days, and in addition all Fridays, the day of Christ’s crucifixion, were included. In all, about half the days of the year became “lean” days, and food prohibitions for these days were strictly enforced. Under English law the penalty for eating meat on Friday was hanging.

On lean days sex was forbidden, and eating was to be limited to one meal. Red meat was “hot” and therefore banned because it was associated with sex. However, animals found in water—which included the tails but not the bodies of beavers, sea otters, porpoises, and whales—were deemed cool, and acceptable food for religious days.

Fresh whale meat was also for the rich. The great delicacy was the tongue. Salted tongue of any kind was appreciated, but especially whale tongue. For the poor, there was craspois, also called craspoix, or grapois. This was strips of the fattier parts of the whale, salt-cured like bacon and sometimes called in French lard de carême, which translates as “lent blubber,” because it was one of the principal foods available to the peasantry for lean days on which other red meats were not allowed.

Nevertheless, Rouen merchants who sold craspoix to the English paid high tariffs at London Bridge, which suggests this salted whale blubber was a luxury product in England. This would not be the last time the food of French peasants was sold as a treat for wealthy Englishmen.

Craspoix. This is salted whale meat. It should be cut in slices uncooked and cooked in water like fatback: serve it with peas. Peas at the time were dried and cooked as beans are today, so that this dish resembled pork and beans.

all the Vikings had to trade were tools made from walrus tusk and reindeer antler. In search of a trading commodity, they raided coastal communities in northern Europe, kidnapped people, and sold them into slavery, which is why they are still remembered for their brutality.

With their sturdy, new, long-distance ships equipped with enormous storage holds, the Basques were no longer limited to the whale’s winter grounds in their native Bay of Biscay. They loaded their rowboats onto ships and traveled more than 1,000 miles.

Fat resists salt and slows the rate at which salt impregnates fish.

the Basques had spent centuries surrounded by the Roman Empire, where salted fish was a common food, which is probably why they thought of salt-curing whale meat. Now they started salting cod. The market was enormous. All of the formerly Roman world ate salt fish, and the Basques had a salt fish to sell that, after a day or more of soaking in fresh water, was whiter, leaner, and better, according to many, than the dark, oily, Mediterranean species that had been used before.

Being a fatless fish, air-dried and salt-cured, salt cod, stiff as planks of wood, could be stacked on wagons and hauled over roads, even in warm Mediterranean climates. It was better than crapoix and equally affordable, and being a fish, was Church-approved for holy days.

ALL OF THE fishing nations of northern Europe wanted to participate in the new, rapidly growing, extremely profitable salt cod market. They had the cod but they needed salt, and the Vikings may have been pivotal in solving this problem as well. One of the first Viking bases in the Loire was the island of Noirmoutier. One third of this long thin island, barely detached from the mainland of France at the estuary of the Loire, is a natural tidal swamp, which strong tides periodically flood with a fresh supply of seawater.

As Europeans began to recognize that the natural solar evaporation of seawater was the most cost-effective way to produce salt, this area on the southern side of the Brittany peninsula, the Bay of Bourgneuf, became a leading salt center.

Meanwhile, Basque ships sailed out with their enormous holds full of salt and returned with them stacked high with cod. They dominated the fast-growing salt cod market, just as they had the whale market, and they used their whale-hunting techniques as a model for cod fishing.

Did the Basques reach North America before John Cabot’s 1497 voyage and the age of exploration? During the fifteenth century, most Atlantic fishing communities believed that they had. But without physical proof, many historians are skeptical, just as they were for many years about the stories of Viking travels to North America.

In the Middle Ages, salt already had a wide variety of industrial applications besides preserving food. It was used to cure leather, to clean chimneys, for soldering pipes, to glaze pottery, and as a medicine for a wide variety of complaints from toothaches, to upset stomachs, to “heaviness of mind.”

Until the sixteenth-century cod boom, La Rochelle had been a minor port because it was not on a river. But suddenly, riverless La Rochelle, because it was an Atlantic port near the He de Ré saltworks, became the leading Newfoundland fishing port of Europe.

The Breton fishing ports also had a salt advantage. Salt was heavily taxed in France, but in order to bring the Celtic duchy of Brittany into the French kingdom, France had offered the peninsula an exemption from the hated gabelle, the French salt tax.

While northerners had the fish but could not make the salt and southerners had salt but not the cod, the Basques had neither.

Northern salts made from boiling peat and southern salts such as that of Setúbal were far whiter, which meant purer.

After that the salt producers built a seventeen-mile wall separating the sea from the marshland. This wall, which prevents the flooding of 4,400 acres of salt ponds, is still maintained by the salt workers. Here, a salt worker is called a paludier, literally a swamp worker.

like mariners at sea, the paludiers could get a bearing from the distant black stone church steeples, especially the Moorish tip of Saint-Guénolé in Le Bourg de Batz, the church named after the patron saint of paludiers. The 180-foot steeple was added to the fifteenth-century church in the 1600s to show navigators the entrance from the marsh to the Loire.

the Irish corned beef still traveled far, in part because it was adopted by the British navy—competing with salt cod as a provision.