Salt: A World History

by Mark Kurlansky

The rock salt of Alsace does not have a high concentration of sodium chloride but has a considerable concentration of potassium chloride, known as potash, and in modern times the Alsatian habit of mining the potash for fertilizer and dumping the sodium chloride in the Rhine has become a major environmental issue.

By the sixteenth century, a trade existed in Alsace known as a surkrutschneider. Literally sauerkraut tailors, surkrutschneiders chopped cabbage and salted it in barrels with anise seeds, bay leaves, elderberries, fennel, horseradish, savory, cloves, cumin, and other herbs and spices. Each surkrutschneider had his own secret recipe.

in 1246 Louis established the first French Mediterranean port, a walled city named Aigues-Mortes, which means “dead waters.”

This idea of Saint Louis, for Mediterranean saltworks to be controlled for royal revenue, would one day grow into what would be remembered as one of the greatest disasters of French royal administration.

French cheese makers were trying to be neither difficult nor original. They were all trying to preserve milk in salt so they could have a way of keeping it as a food supply. But with different traditions and climates, the salted curds came out 265 different ways.

The farmers would collect the milk, curdle it with rennet, then scoop the curds by hand into molds. A powder made from grating moldy bread was sprinkled into the curds. At least since the seventeenth century, the mold came from a huge round bread, half wheat and half rye. Probably other breads were used earlier. The bread was stored in the same damp caves that aged the cheese, and in a few weeks it turned blue and was ground to dust for cheese making. The crumbs fermented in the cheese, creating bubbles, which after weeks also started to turn blue.

The salt of Aigues-Mortes is rubbed on the top of the cheeses at the outset of aging. Twenty-four hours later, the cheese is turned and the process repeated.

THE BASQUES LEARNED how to make hams in their long war with the Celts and then learned to market them in their long peace with the ham-loving Romans. Jambon de Bayonne, Bayonne ham, was never made in Bayonne but was shipped from the Basque port of Bayonne at the mouth of the Adour River. It has never been clear, however, if the ham is Basque, though the Basques surprise no one by insisting that it is.

The town grew up around the mouth of a natural brine spring where a large basin was built to catch the escaping brine. The basin was edged in steps to facilitate approaching it with buckets. The earliest mention of this pool is in the twelfth century, and every narrow, winding street in Salies leads to it.

If a woman married “a foreigner”—someone from out of town—her children would only be entitled to a half portion, thirteen sameaux, and their future descendants would receive nothing. But a man could marry an out-of-towner, and he and his heirs would receive full portions.

The French Crown attached such importance to the commercial potential of Collioure salted fish that the town was exempted from any salt tax. This greatly aided the local anchovy business, but it was the sort of arbitrary exception that was to make the French salt tax a political disaster.

IN GERMANY, THE Romans had found a land of ancient salt mines. Tacitus wrote in the first century A.D. that the Germanic tribes believed the gods listened more attentively to prayers if they were uttered in a salt mine.

Underground springs provided brine that could be boiled into salt crystals. Plentiful forests offered cheap energy. Reichenhall, which was still in operation in Roman times, was destroyed in the fifth century either by Attila the Hun or possibly by the local supporters of Odoacer, Rome’s final conqueror, the Germanic-Italian who in 476 officially ended the Western Roman Empire.

A medieval conflict between the archbishops of Salzburg and the Bavarians over control of the salt mines continued for centuries because Dürnberg mountain contained a Salzburger mine entered on the Hallein side and a Bavarian mine entered from Berchtesgaden.

The first archbishop of Salzburg had resurrected the ancient Celtic mine in the late eighth century and with this salt revenue had built the city of Salzburg, which did not merge with Austria until 1816. Though Salzburg’s territory had gold, copper, and silver, it was salt for which Salzburg repeatedly fought. The wealth from salt gave Salzburg its independence.

In the seventeenth century, an archbishop named Wolf Dietrich tried to dominate the salt market by dramatically lowering the selling price for salt from his mines, especially Dürnberg. For a time Dietrich made tremendous profits, some of which were used to build grand baroque buildings in Salzburg.

It was even more disastrous for Archbishop Wolf Dietrich, who was removed from his Church post and, after five years in prison, died in 1617.

IN 1268 AND possibly earlier, a new technique was used to mine rock salt. Instead of miners carrying chunks of rock out steep shafts in baskets slung on their backs, and then crushing the rock into salt, water was piped into a dug-out vein of rock salt.

Eventually, the idea became a more sophisticated system known in the Salzkammergut as sinkwerken. A sinkwerk was an underground work area in which the surrounding salt and clay were mixed with water in large wooden tanks. The solution then moved down wooden pipes to iron boiling pans.

The Salzach is a tributary of the Danube, and the brown Danube runs, with its tentacles of tributaries, from west of Bavaria through central Europe to the Black Sea. The salt could be boiled in cylindrical molds, much as it still is in Saharan Africa, and the cylinders could be loaded in barges that traveled the Salzach to Passau, where it entered the Danube, to be traded in Germany or central Europe.

Transporting on land was expensive because tolls were established along the roadways for wagons carrying salt. The inevitable response was a network of paths over rugged mountain passes for smugglers carrying illegal salt, which they could sell for less because they paid no tolls.

RIVERS WERE ESSENTIAL to central European saltworks. Halle in central Germany and Lüneburg in the north, with its famous founding ham, had the advantage of the Elbe with its mouth at the North Sea port of Hamburg.

The pan sat on a wood-burning furnace. Blood was added, which caused a scum to rise with boiling. The scum drew impurities and was skimmed off with care. The salt maker needed to continually stir the liquid. Shortly before crystallization, beer was added to further draw impurities from the crystals, which were then placed to dry in conical baskets.

With the pans in use twenty-four hours a day, except for a once-a-week cleaning, the entire operation required only three people: a master salter, an assistant, and a boy to stoke the furnace. This staff was often simply a man, his wife, and a son.

THE SALZKAMMERGUT DEVELOPED its own salt-mining culture. Saint Barbara was its patron saint, and miners observed her day, December 4, by performing traditional dances in their own dress uniforms, which, by the nineteenth century, included a black wool jacket with brass buttons and epaulets and a black velvet hat with silk buttons and a gold emblem of two crossed pickaxes.

Today, one of the 400-year-old tunnels is only about eighteen inches wide in parts. Another seventeenth-century tunnel is about three feet wide.

Miners would ride on steep, smooth wooden slides, which propelled them at considerable speed down to tunnels sometimes as far as 100 feet lower. Some of the slides are more than 350 feet long. A cable on the right side provided a brake for the practiced gloved hands of the miners.

A miner at the top and five or six guests, all hugging each other, slid down as if they were in a roller coaster car. The mine also has about twenty-five underground lakes for boat rides.

Pig fat was a staple for both eating and preserving other food. From the seventeenth century on, fat was included in wages.

An 1884 study showed that rural Hungarians ate an average per capita of forty pounds of cured—salted or smoked—fat, whereas city dwellers consumed an average per person of fifty-six pounds of fat. This does not include the significant amount of rendered animal fat that was eaten like butter, not to mention butter itself.

At first, salt miners, often prisoners of war, were worked to death in slave conditions. Not until the fourteenth century, when free men began working the mines, did it become less than a death sentence.

Horses that were brought in to work the mines spent their entire lives below ground.

In 1689, the mines began offering miners daily Catholic services at their underground place-of-work. The miners of Wieliczka began carving religious figures out of rock salt. Three hundred feet below the surface, miners carved a chapel out of rock salt with statues and bas-relief scenes along the floor, walls, and ceiling.

Any salt with a water route to the Baltic had a huge market. But the Baltic port also meant that the coarse, dark gray rock salt of southern Poland had to compete with sea salt from France and Portugal.

IN 1772, POLAND was partitioned between Austria, Prussia, and Russia—vanished as a nation until after World War I. In acquiring the Galicia region, the Austrian Hapsburgs gained control of Wieliczka and Bochnia.

in Russia, beef was often frozen solid in the ground and sawed up with little regard for different cuts.

The importance in central Europe of lactic fermentation of vegetables, commonly known as pickling, is best expressed by the Lithuanians, who recognize a guardian spirit of pickling named Roguszys.

The amount of salt used in sauerkraut in Russia and Poland depended on the economic status of the family. Families that could afford to do so used not only salt but seasoning, such as caraway seeds, dill, and in southern Poland, cherry leaves. In Moravia apples and onions were added.

Women would slice the cabbage, scald it in hot water, and place it in barrels—sometimes in wood-lined ditches in the ground. Then men would pound it with clubs or by stamping their feet to prevent air bubbles, which could cause rot. Women then covered the cabbage with linen and lids weighted by heavy stones to make sure the vegetable remained completely submerged.

The Polish national dish, bigos, is sauerkraut to which meat, bacon, pickled plums, and other fruits are added. The dish, a kind of Polish choucroute, was made in past centuries in a clearing in the forest. Hunters, generally aristocrats, would come to the clearing to add their game.

The importance of the Mersey lay not in the goods it carried those few dozen miles into England but in what it carried from England to the world. The last three miles of the river form a sheltered, deepwater harbor, and in 1207, King John granted permission for a town to be built there, which was called Liverpool.

It was the port of West Indian sugar, the port of the slave trade, the Industrial Revolution port that brought iron to coal and then shipped out steel. But before any of this, it was the port of English salt, Cheshire salt, or, as it became known all over the world, Liverpool salt.

WHEN THE ROMANS came to England in A.D. 43, they found the Britons making salt by pouring brine on hot charcoal and scraping off the crystals that formed. To the Romans, this was a sign of pitiful backwardness, and being the model imperialists, they taught these primitive locals the right way to make salt—by evaporating brine in earthen pots and then smashing the pots to expose white cakes of salt.

The earliest evidence of salt making in Cheshire, pottery fragments dated to 600 B.C., shows that the Britons had long known the “new” Roman technique.

The locals too learned to evaporate in lead pans, but preferred a nearby location called Hellath Wenn, white pit, and not by coincidence this produced a whiter salt.

Anglo Saxons called a saltworks a wich, and any place in England where the name ends in “wich” at one time produced salt.

CHESTER WAS ON the River Dee, which had an estuary that provided a deepwater port similar to that of the Mersey. Once Liverpool was founded on the Mersey, the two towns, with their two parallel rivers only a few miles apart, were competitors until the Dee began silting up and all the trade shifted to Liverpool.

British saltworks could not provide the sea salt needed for British fisheries. Even when the English made a special high-quality salt for the cure of the best herring, a salt called white on white, they made it with French sea salt, dissolving the French salt in water and reevaporating it to remove impurities.

By this time the motivation was less religious than economic—the government wanted to support the fishing industry. A 1563 proposal to extend the lean days to twice a week, adding Wednesday to Friday, was supported by the argument that it would build up the fishing fleet. It took twenty-two years of debate, but the idea of a second fast day was finally dropped in 1585.

Animals were slaughtered on Martinmas, November 10, the Saint Day of Martin, an austere Roman soldier in Gaul who converted to Christianity and became the patron saint of reformed drunkards.