Salt: A World History

by Mark Kurlansky

Hawaiians traditionally made salt for home use by hollowing out a rock to a bowl-like shape and leaving sea water to evaporate in it. They quickly learned to dig evaporation ponds and developed a trade provisioning British, French, and later American ships with salted food such as corned beef, which then became part of their diet as well.

FOR THE BRITISH, salt was regarded as of strategic importance because salt cod and corned beef became the rations of the British navy. It was the same with the French. In fact, by the fourteenth century, for most of northern Europe the standard procedure to prepare for war was to obtain a large quantity of salt and start salting fish and meat.

The rest of the year, larger sardines were layered in the local salt for twelve days, then washed in seawater and put in barrels. The barrels had holes on the bottom, and on the top was a heavy wooden beam hinged to the wall on one side and weighted with a boulder on the other. The juice was squeezed through the bottom, and every few days another layer of sardines was added until after two weeks the barrel could hold no more.

this increase in salt made more fish available. Fishermen, instead of rushing to market with their small catch before it rotted, could stay out for days salting their catch. Expeditions to Newfoundland were out from spring until fall.

Salt cod by the bail, along with salted herring by the barrel, are justly credited with having prevented famine in many parts of Europe.

The Swedes had a wealth of herring but nothing with which to salt it.

Herring was such a dominant fish in the medieval market that in twelfth-century Paris saltwater fish dealers were called harengères, herring sellers.

Herring is a Clupeidae, a member of the same family of small, forked-tailed oily fish with a single dorsal fin as sardines. Anchovies are of a different family but of the same Clupeiforme order as sardines and herring.

The fact that herring became a hugely successful item of trade in the fourteenth century is directly related to the fact that Atlantic nations, herring producers, were gaining power and controlling markets and commerce in a way they never had before.

Herring hide in ocean depths in winter, but in the spring until fall they rise and swim, sometimes thousands of miles, to their coastal spawning grounds. This phenomenon takes place from the Russian and Scandinavian Baltic, across the North Sea, as far south as northern France, and across the Atlantic from Newfoundland to the Chesapeake Bay.

It is a peculiarity of the English language that while most fish swim in schools, herring swim in shoals, a word of the same meaning derived from the same Anglo-Saxon root. A herring shoal consists of thousands of fish and, once located, provides an ample catch.

herring feed by gulping in seawater as they swim and filtering out minuscule zooplankton. They will search thousands of miles for these drifting beds of food, which means that a spot that had always been teeming with herring may suddenly one day be devoid of a single one, and they might not return to that spot for years. For the peoples of northern Europe who depended on herring, this could be a cataclysmic event, often blamed on the sins of the village folk. In the Middle Ages, adultery was thought to be a major cause of the herring leaving.

What really happened in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was not so much new ways of salting nor new ways of fishing but an increased supply of salt. This was especially important for herring because the salt had to be readily available for the fishery.

Unlike the fat-free cod, herring must be salted within twenty-four hours of being lifted from the sea. This was an almost universally agreed upon and inviolable law of herring curing. In 1424, the count of Holland threatened to prosecute any fishermen who cured a herring that had been out of the water for more than twenty-four hours.

In 1350, Wilhelm Beuckelzon, a fisherman from Zeeland, the fishing center of south Holland—or in other accounts Wilhelm Beucks, a fish merchant in Flanders—started a practice of pickling herring in brine, fresh with no drying at all, and therefore the fish could be cured without the risk of its fat turning rancid from exposure to the air.

in truth Beuckelzon’s invention ranks with Marco Polo’s discovery of pasta, or even Columbus’s discovery of America, as one of history’s more bogus tales.

At the time of Beuckelzon’s invention, herring already had been barreled in brine by the Scandinavians, the French, the Flemish, and the English for centuries.

These tributes, even if factually dubious, do speak to the importance northern nations attached to barreled brine-salted herring.

Cured herring had an even lower standing than salted cod, and it was hated by many poor people who had nothing else to eat for holy days. The French way of saying that breeding will tell is le caque sent toujours le hareng, the barrel always smells of herring.

In northern Holland and southern Denmark, peat salt was made by burning peat that was impregnated with seawater. This ocean-soaked peat, known in Dutch as zelle, was dug from the tidal flats off the coast.

Porters would carry the sea-logged peat to huts, where it was dried and burned. All that would remain would be ashes and salt. Saltwater was added, and it would absorb the salt in a brine and leave behind the ashes.

The Finnish, too, made salt by this process, boiling down arctic seawater near the current Russian town of Murmansk. The salt was mostly used for the productive salmon fishery of the area, but some of it was shipped by cart to Finland and Russia. The Norwegians used a similar process. Though this salt was expensive, the demand made it economically feasible. Oslo was actually a salt trading center.

Adding to their mystique, herring seem to let out a cry when they die, a high-pitched hiss, which is probably air escaping the swimming bladder.

A NUMBER OF ways were found to preserve herring with small quantities of salt. The Dutch had their groene haringen, green herring, sometimes called new herring, which was gutted on board ship in early spring or late fall—before or after spawning. The herring were deboned, but the gall bladder had to be left in the fish because it contains enzymes that cure it.

For both meat and fish, smoking was a northern solution to a lack of salt. Salt is needed for smoking but in smaller quantities, because the smoking aids in conservation.

Finnan haddie, a haddock soaked in brine and then smoked over peat and sawdust, was originally called Findon haddocks because it was made in the Scottish North Sea town of Findon, near Aberdeen.

Surströmming was a basic ration of the Swedish army in the seventeenth century during the fifty years of sporadic armed conflict that is known as the Thirty Years War. It is still regulated by a medieval royal ordinance and must be made from herring caught in April and May just before spawning. The head and entrails are removed, but the roe is kept in the herring, which is put into light brine in barrels holding 200 pounds of fish. The fish are left to ferment in the barrels for ten to twelve weeks at a temperature between fifty-four and sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit.

Originally it was taken from the barrel, but in modern times it is canned in July. By eating time in September, the can is bulging on the top and bottom and looks ready to explode. As the can is opened, the family stands around it to get the first fumes. Nowadays some of the younger members flee the room.

The can opener digs in, and a white milky brine fizzes out, bubbling like fermented cider and smelling like a blend of Parmesan cheese and the bilge water from an ancient fishing vessel.

That sounds...adventurous.

Like garum, though, surströmming is in truth fermented and not rotten, because the brine the fish is dipped in is sufficient to prevent putrification until the fermentation process takes over.

surströmming has a strong flavor, one revered by aficionados of cured fish and loathed by the less initiated.

In recent years a Swedish company tried to export surströmming to the United States, but the U.S. government refused it entry on the grounds that it was rotten.

A barrel containing 500 to 600 herring would require fifty-five pints of salt.

Between 1250 and 1350, a grouping of small associations in northern German cities formed. Known as the Hanseatic League, from the Middle High German word Hanse, meaning “fellowship,” these associations pooled their resources to form more powerful groups to act in their commercial interests. They stopped piracy in the Baltic, initiated quality control on traded items, established commercial laws, provided reliable nautical charts, and built lighthouses and other aids to navigation.

By the fourteenth century, the Hanseatics controlled the mouths of all the northerly flowing rivers of central Europe from the Rhine to the Vistula. They had organizations in Iceland, in London, and as far south as the Ukraine and even in Venice. This gave them the ability to buy salt from numerous sources to supply the northern countries.

To control herring and salt was to control northern economies. In 1360, the Danes went to war with the Hanseatics over control of herring

By 1403, when the Hanseatic League gained complete control of Bergen, Norway, it had achieved a monopoly on northern European production of herring and salt but not without constant warfare with rebellious Baltic states. In 1406, the Hanseatics caught ninety-six British fishermen off Bergen, tied their hands and feet, and threw them overboard.

The seasonal arrival of the herring shoals became essential to the economies of both England and Holland. In medieval England, every spring, lookouts were posted along the important seaward points of eastern Britain to spot the arrival of the herring.

Like the Venetian salt fleet, the huge Dutch herring fleet was trained as an armed naval force that fought numerous wars in Europe and the Caribbean against the British professional navy. Finally, in 1652, the British navy destroyed the Dutch herring fleet.

IN A 1961 speech, Charles de Gaulle, explaining the ungovernable character of the French nation, said, “Nobody can easily bring together a nation that has 265 kinds of cheese.” The reason for the variety is that, given its limited area, the amalgamation that became France had a remarkable diversity of climates, topography, and cultures.

The Hexagon, as the French would come to call it, bordered the Lowlands, the Rhine, the Alps, the Mediterranean, the Pyrenees, the Atlantic, and the English Channel, which the French have never called English but simply La Manche, the sleeve, a word that refers to its long and narrow shape.

The royal tables of the diverse medieval and Renaissance French kingdoms were set with huge, ornate nefs, ships, in this case jeweled vessels holding salt. A nef was both a saltcellar and a symbol of the “ship of state.” Salt symbolized both health and preservation.

In 1378, Charles V of France hosted a famous dinner that posed the awkward question of where to place the nef. Should it be in front of him or by his guest Charles IV, the Prague-born Holy Roman Emperor? And what about the emperor’s son who was also joining them, King Wenceslaus of Germany, who would become emperor after his father’s death later that same year? It was decided that the table had to be set with three large nefs, one for each of the three monarchs.

In the fifteenth century, Jean, duc de Berry, featured on his banquet table a gold ship that held not only salt but pepper, as well as, according to some accounts, powdered unicorn horn.

In the sixteenth century, when things Italian were especially fashionable, Benvenuto Cellini, the Florentine high-Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith, made a saltcellar for King François I of France, perennial war maker and insatiable art enthusiast.

Although salting was often done in the home, it was usually not women’s work. The medieval French, like the Chinese, believed that the presence of women could be destructive to fermentation.

In France, a menstruating woman is said to be en salaison, curing in salt. It was dangerous to have a woman in a room full of fermenting food when she herself was in fermentation. “It will spoil the lard,” people would say.

The fuck is wrong with the French

Choucroute appears to have evolved from German sauerkraut. But the French, having a resistance to acknowledging German origins in their culture, argue that the Chinese salted cabbage, and the Tartars made it, and, always the favorite French source for foreign food, Catherine de Médicis might have introduced it.

The Romans made sauerkraut and were great cabbage enthusiasts.

The Alsatian word for choucroute, surkrut, resembles the German, sauerkraut. Both words have the same meaning: sour or pickled grass.